Numbers in French: The Complete Guide from 0 to a Trilliard

French numbers are perfectly ordinary from 1 to 69. Then, at 70, the language stops naming its tens and starts doing arithmetic out loud. 70 is soixante-dix▶, "sixty-ten". 80 is quatre-vingts▶, "four-twenties". And 97 is quatre-vingt-dix-sept▶, literally "four-twenties-ten-seven". Yes, really.

This is the complete reference: every number from 0 to 100 with native audio, the hundreds and thousands, millions, and the long scale all the way to the trilliard, plus ordinals, fractions, decimals, how Belgium fixed the 70 problem, and the numbers the French consider unlucky. Bookmark it and you will not need another page.

The short answer: 1 is un▶, 10 is dix▶, 100 is cent▶, 1000 is mille▶, and a million is un million▶. Now the detail.

French Numbers 1 to 100 (Complete Table)

Every number, with a play button on each. Tap any of them to hear a native voice.

1 to 20

21 to 40

41 to 60

61 to 80

81 to 100

Sixteen is the last unique word. After that, French is transparent until 69, and eccentric after it. Here are the rules.

1 to 69: The Easy Part

The tens behave: vingt▶ (20), trente▶ (30), quarante▶ (40), cinquante▶ (50), soixante▶ (60). Add the unit with a hyphen: vingt-deux, quarante-cinq, soixante-huit.

One quirk: at 21, 31, 41, 51 and 61, French inserts et, with no hyphens:

• 21 = vingt et un▶
• 31 = trente et un▶
• 41 = quarante et un▶

So 21 is vingt et un but 22 is vingt-deux. That is the only oddity down here.

From 17, the teens are already transparent: dix-sept▶ is literally ten-seven. English does the same thing backwards with seventeen.

The Wall: 70, 80, 90

French has no word for seventy, eighty or ninety. It counts in twenties, a leftover of a base-20 system that survived into modern French. English has a fossil of it too: fourscore and seven years ago is exactly quatre-vingt-sept.

Three details that catch everyone:

1. 71 is soixante et onze, with the et, matching the 21/31/41 pattern. But 81 is quatre-vingt-un, with no et. There is no logic to rescue you.
2. Quatre-vingts takes an s when it stands alone (80), and loses it when a number follows: quatre-vingt-un, quatre-vingt-dix.
3. The seventies reuse the teens. 71 to 79 are soixante plus onze, douze, treize. You are not adding 1 to 9, you are adding 11 to 19.

How Belgium and Switzerland Fixed It

They simply refused:

• 70 = septante▶
• 90 = nonante▶
• 80 = huitante▶ (Switzerland only, not Belgium, which keeps quatre-vingts)

These are not slang or errors. They are the standard forms there, taught in schools, printed on cheques. If you are learning French for Brussels or Geneva, learn septante and nonante. If you are learning for Paris, know them anyway: you will hear them, and you should not freeze.

The Hundreds and Thousands

Four rules:

• cent* takes no *un: it is cent euros, never un cent euros.
• cents takes an s only when it ends the number: deux cents, but deux cent cinq. Same logic as quatre-vingts.
• mille is invariable. Never milles. It is the most reliable word in French numbers.
• million is a noun, so it takes un, it pluralises, and it needs de before a noun: un million d'euros, never un million euros.

The Billion Trap: A Billion Is Not Un Billion

This is the most consequential thing on this page, and it is a factor of one thousand.

English uses the short scale. French uses the long scale, where each new -illion is a million times the previous one, and the -illiard words fill the gaps.

Read that twice. English billion (10⁹) is French milliard. French billion (10¹²) is English trillion. And French trillion (10¹⁸) is English quintillion, not trillion.

So "Apple is worth three trillion dollars" is trois billions de dollars, or more naturally trois mille milliards. A footballer on "a hundred million" is cent millions in both, which is why the error hides so well: it only bites above a billion.

The French press mostly writes milliard, so in practice you will meet milliard constantly and billion almost never. That is exactly the trap: an English speaker reads billion in a French text and mentally halves the figure by a thousand.

Ordinal Numbers

The rule is mercifully simple: take the number, drop a final e if there is one (quatre to quatrième), add -ième. Only premier is irregular. Cinq adds a u, neuf turns its f into a v.

Unlike Spanish, French keeps using ordinals well past ten: le vingt et unième siècle is perfectly normal.

Fractions, Decimals and Percentages

• 1/2, 1/3 and 1/4 are irregular (demi, tiers, quart). From 1/5 up, fractions just borrow the ordinals.
• Decimals use a comma, and you say virgule▶: 3,14 is trois virgule quatorze. Writing 3.14 in France reads as a date or a typo.
• Thousands use a space, not a comma: 1 000 000. A price written 1,50 € is one euro fifty.
• Percentages need no article: vingt pour cent, unlike Spanish.

Pronunciation: What the Spelling Hides

Three details do most of the work.

Final consonants appear and vanish. Six alone is SEESS. Six ans is see-ZAN. Six cents is see SAN, with the x silent entirely. The same word, three pronunciations, depending on the next sound. This also hits dix, huit, neuf and cinq, and it is the main reason learners who "know" the numbers still fail to catch them in speech.

Neuf becomes a v before a vowel. Neuf ans is nuh-VAN, not nuhf ahn. It happens with ans and heures, the two words you need it for most.

Numbers arrive as one chunk. Nobody says quatre... vingt... dix... sept. They say it in one breath, with no seams. You will not parse it by decoding, only by recognising the whole shape.

This is exactly where written guides run out of road. A table can show you quatre-vingt-dix-sept, but it cannot prepare your ear for it fired at you as a price, and it will never teach you the liaison that turns six into three different words. The only fix is to hear a native say the whole number, then say it back out loud, several times, until it stops being arithmetic. That listen and repeat loop is called shadowing, and for French numbers it is the difference between knowing them and using them. It is how the Hyperpolyglot app handles every phrase: real sentences, native audio, looped until they come out automatically. Available on iOS, Android, and Web.

The Numbers the French Treat as Special

• Friday the 13th cuts both ways. Vendredi 13 is unlucky, but it is also the biggest lottery day of the year in France: the national operator runs a special draw and ticket sales spike. Superstition and hope, same date.
• soixante-neuf▶ carries the same innuendo it does in English. French teenagers snigger at page 69 too.
• Phone numbers are read in pairs. 06 12 34 56 78 is zéro six, douze, trente-quatre, cinquante-six, soixante-dix-huit. This is why French phone numbers feel impossible at first: you are being handed five two-digit numbers, not ten digits.
• Roman numerals for centuries and kings. Le XXIᵉ siècle is read le vingt et unième siècle. Louis XIV is Louis quatorze.
• un googol▶ is a 1 followed by a hundred zeros, and l'infini▶ is infinity. Negative five is moins cinq▶.
• Floors start at zero. The rez-de-chaussée is the ground floor, and the premier étage is what an American calls the second floor. Not a number word, but a numeric trap that puts you on the wrong landing.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

1. Expecting a word for 70. There is not one in France. It is soixante-dix.
2. Saying quatre-vingt et un. No et in the eighties. Only 21, 31, 41, 51, 61 and 71 take it.
3. Saying un billion for a billion. It is un milliard. A billion is a thousand times bigger.
4. Writing deux cents cinq. The s vanishes when a number follows: deux cent cinq.
5. Putting an s on mille. Never. Deux mille.
6. Forgetting de after million. Un million d'euros.
7. Decoding phone numbers digit by digit. The French say them in pairs. Train for pairs.
8. Assuming septante is wrong. It is standard in Belgium and Switzerland, and frankly better.

Bonus: The Numbers You Will Actually Use First

• Prices: ça fait combien ?▶, "how much is it?"
• Age: j'ai trente ans▶, "I have thirty years". French has an age rather than is one.
• Ordering: une table pour deux▶, "a table for two".
• Time: il est huit heures et quart▶, "it's quarter past eight".
• Dates use cardinals, except the first: le premier mai▶, but le deux mai▶.

Learn 1 to 16, learn the hyphen and et rules, then drill 70 to 99 on their own until they stop being sums. Do it with real audio rather than a table, and the wall turns out to be a speed bump.

Keep Reading

• Language Islands -- the real-sentence method that turns vocabulary into actual conversations
• The Easiest Languages to Learn -- where French sits for English speakers
• The Shadowing Technique -- how to drill pronunciation until it becomes automatic