Numbers in Italian: The Complete Guide from 0 to a Trillion

Italian numbers are among the friendliest in Europe. There is a real word for every ten (unlike French), the spelling is phonetic (unlike English), and everything from 20 to 99 is built by welding two words together.

There is exactly one rule that catches everyone, and no beginner guide explains it: when you add uno or otto, the ten loses its final vowel. So it is not ventiuno, it is ventuno. Not trentaotto, but trentotto.

This is the complete reference: every number from 0 to 100 with native audio, the elision rule, the hundreds and thousands, the long scale to the trillion, ordinals, fractions, and the numbers Italians consider unlucky. Bookmark it and you will not need another page.

The short answer: 1 is uno▶, 10 is dieci▶, 100 is cento▶, 1000 is mille▶, and a million is un milione▶. Now the detail.

Italian 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

The Elision Rule

Here is the one thing to internalise. From 20 up, you glue the ten and the unit into a single word: venti + due = ventidue. Simple.

But uno and otto start with a vowel, and Italian refuses the collision. The ten drops its final vowel:

Only uno and otto trigger it. Ventidue, ventitré, ventiquattro keep the vowel, because d, t and q are consonants.

And a second small rule: tre takes an accent at the end of a compound. Alone it is tre, but 23 is ventitré▶, 43 is quarantatré▶. The accent marks the stress, which lands on that final syllable.

The Tens

Notice how regular they are from 40 up: quattro to quaranta, sei to sessanta, sette to settanta, otto to ottanta, nove to novanta. Italian, like Spanish and unlike French, has a real word for every ten. No four-twenties.

And the teens are transparent from 17: diciassette▶ is dieci + sette, diciotto▶ is dieci + otto, diciannove▶ is dieci + nove. Only 11 to 16 have to be learned.

The Hundreds and Thousands

Three rules:

• cento is invariable. It never takes un before it and never an s after: duecento, trecento, cinquecento. Easier than Spanish (doscientas) and French (deux cents).
• mille becomes mila in the plural. One thousand is mille, two thousand is duemila. This is the only irregular plural in Italian numbers, and it is why Italians say Duemila for the year 2000.
• milione is a noun, so it takes un, it pluralises (due milioni), and it needs di before a noun: un milione di euro, never un milione euro. Same behaviour as Spanish millón de.

Italian also writes numbers with a dot for thousands and a comma for decimals: 1.000.000 and 3,14. Exactly like Spanish, opposite to English.

The Billion Trap: A Billion Is Not Un Bilione

Italian uses the long scale, like Spanish, French and German. English uses the short scale. The gap is a factor of a thousand.

English billion (10⁹) is Italian miliardo, not bilione. And Italian bilione (10¹²) is English trillion.

In practice, Italians say miliardo constantly and bilione almost never, which is exactly what makes the trap dangerous: an English speaker reads bilione in an Italian text and is out by a thousand. Italy's public debt is discussed in miliardi, and you will hear that word on the news every single day.

Ordinal Numbers

The first ten are irregular and must be learned. From 11 up, the rule is beautifully simple: drop the final vowel and add -esimo. Undici to undicesimo. Venti to ventesimo. Cento to centesimo. No exceptions.

Ordinals agree in gender and number: la prima volta, i primi giorni.

You will meet them constantly with popes and monarchs: Papa Francesco, but Giovanni Paolo secondo. And il Cinquecento▶ means the 1500s, the century of the Renaissance: Italians name centuries by their hundreds.

Fractions, Decimals and Percentages

Fractions simply borrow the ordinals from 1/3 up, which makes them easier than in French. The decimal separator is virgola▶, the comma.

Pronunciation: What the Spelling Hides

Three details do most of the work.

C and G change sound before e and i. This is the rule that governs Italian, and it hits the numbers: cinque▶ is CHEEN-kweh, not "sin-kweh". dieci▶ is DYEH-chee. undici▶ is OON-dee-chee. quindici▶, sedici▶: every one of those ci endings is a ch sound.

Double consonants are really held. Sette (7), otto (8), novanta against nove. Italian genuinely lengthens the tt in otto, and it is not decoration: sete (thirst) and sette (seven) are different words. English and Spanish speakers flatten them, and it is the single most recognisable foreign accent in Italian.

Stress is almost always on the second-to-last syllable, except where an accent tells you otherwise: ventitré, trentatré. That is what the accent is for.

This is exactly where written guides run out of road. A table can show you ventotto, but it cannot make your mouth hold the tt, and it will never train your ear for a price fired at you at a market stall in Naples. 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 it is what turns sessantotto from something you assemble into something you simply say. 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 Italians Treat as Special

• 17 is the unlucky number, not 13. This is the one that surprises everyone. In Roman numerals XVII is an anagram of VIXI, Latin for "I have lived", meaning "I am dead". Italian planes skip row 17, some hotels skip the floor, and Renault sold its R17 as R177 in Italy. diciassette▶ is the number to know about.
• 13 is often lucky in Italy, the reverse of Anglo superstition. Though Venerdì 17 (Friday the 17th) is the genuinely dreaded date.
• il Cinquecento▶, il Seicento, il Novecento: the 1500s, 1600s, 1900s. Italians name their centuries this way, and art history borrowed it wholesale.
• tredici▶ used to mean a jackpot: the old Totocalcio football pools required predicting 13 results, so fare tredici means to hit the big one.
• un googol▶ is a 1 followed by a hundred zeros, and infinito▶ is infinity.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

1. Saying ventiuno. It is ventuno. Elision with uno and otto is compulsory.
2. Saying un bilione for a billion. It is un miliardo.
3. Saying due mille. It is duemila.
4. Forgetting di after milione. Un milione di euro.
5. Pronouncing cinque as "sin-kweh". It is CHEEN-kweh.
6. Flattening the double consonants. Sette and otto really hold them.
7. Forgetting the accent on tré. Ventitré, not ventitre.
8. Assuming 13 is unlucky. In Italy, it is 17.

Bonus: The Numbers You Will Actually Use First

• Prices: Quanto costa?▶ and the answer, due euro e cinquanta▶.
• Age: Ho trentacinque anni▶, "I have thirty-five years". Italian has an age, like French and Spanish.
• Ordering: Un tavolo per due▶, a table for two.
• Time: Sono le tre e venti▶, "it's three twenty".
• Coffee: due caffè▶. You will need this one hourly.

Learn 1 to 16, then the elision rule, then drill the double consonants until they stop collapsing. Do it with real audio rather than a table, and Italian numbers become the easiest part of the easiest Romance language.

Keep Reading

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