How would you express currency that has over 2 decimals? For example if you said €65.37 that would be "sixty five euros and thirty seven cents". If you have €65.375 would you say "sixty five euros and three hundred seventy five cents". I guess that is wrong though since "three hundred seventy five cents" is actually €3.75
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1Welcome to EL&U! Do you have a specific currency in mind? I cannot find a currency that subdivides into a thousand, though a hundred is rather common. I'm also not entirely sure whether you'd say "sixty five euros and three hundred seventy five cents", since that has never occurred to my knowledge.– A Lambent EyeCommented Dec 21, 2018 at 10:13
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Hello, and thank you for the welcome. I was thinking specifically about euros. I know that this is extremely uncommon. However, when talking about being paid per hour and you want to be very specific and this needs to be on an contract it may be necessary. Or for example in currency exchange rates, where again you may have multiple decimals.– ChrisGeoCommented Dec 21, 2018 at 10:17
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1In the US, we have the term "mill" for 0.001 dollars. It is not commonly used nowadays, though. (Except in expressing property tax rates). See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mill_(currency)– GEdgarCommented Dec 21, 2018 at 14:54
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1Note that in English, when you write “€65,375”, you are writing sixty-five thousand three hundred and seventy-five euro. Decimals are written with points in English, unlike most other European languages (that’s why the Germans say drei komma fünf while the English say three point five).– Janus Bahs JacquetCommented Dec 22, 2018 at 20:04
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1Since this is an English language forum, I changed your commas into decimal points. Feel free to revert the edit.– SpencerCommented Dec 22, 2018 at 21:54
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4 Answers
I would read €65.375 aloud as "sixty-five euros, thirty-seven cents and five tenths of a cent".
It is hard to find authoritative references in writing for how a figure should be read. But it is an established form when writing sums in legal documents - for example:
... there shall be paid unto the said Matthew and Peter, or either of them, the sum of one cent and seven-tenths of a cent per page for each and every page of said work so printed and published by them or either of them, ...
Report Made to the Hon. John Forsyth, Secretary of State of the United States ...the gold coins of Croat Britain, Portugal, and Brazil, of not less than twenty-two carats fine, at the rate of ninety- four cents and eight tenths of a cent per pennyweight ;
A Dictionary Practical, Theoretical and Historical of Commerce and ...
answered Dec 22, 2018 at 23:18
If you're using the comma where we in England would use a decimal point, we'd say, "Sixty-five point three seven five euros per hour. This would represent the figure of €65.375/hour.
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3As you note, schoolchildren in the UK (I don't know about elsewhere) are taught to say a decimal as "point" followed by the digits of decimals separately - e.g. "two six" or "three seven five". Saying "twenty-six" or "three hundred and seventy-five" would be considered a mistake and corrected by the teacher. Interestingly, they do not do this in French, where the decimal part is spoken as a number, unless it is very long, so that 123,102 is "Cent vingt trois virgule cent deux" (One hundred and twenty-three comma one hundred and two). Commented Dec 21, 2018 at 12:16
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1In some European languages longer strings of figures, such as decimals, phone numbers, etc. are often 'grouped' into pairs when spoken, so that pi to eight decimal places, 3.14159265, would be said as the equivalent of "three [separator - point/comma etc] fourteen fifteen ninety-two sixty-five". Commented Dec 21, 2018 at 12:27
You can also say sixty five euros and thirty seven point five, or thirty seven and a half, cents. In general, the value is just a number. You can say sixty five point three seven five euros, or six thousand five hundred and thirty seven and a half cents. If you always want the number of cents to be less than 100, and the number of euros an integer, then for example 65.76543 euros is sixty five euros and seventy six point five four three cents.
You can also say it any way you would express a fractional number. You could say seventy six and five hundred and forty three thousandths of a cent, etc.
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1@KJO I see what you mean. Agree with the updated answer? Commented Dec 22, 2018 at 19:54
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@Spencer It would not be used in American English, certainly. I cannot comment on other English speaking areas because I have no knowledge. I was just using the OP's notation. Commented Dec 22, 2018 at 21:59
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@MattSamuel It’s not used in any English that I know of. The OP carried it over from their own language (many European languages use commas). Commented Dec 22, 2018 at 22:43
There used to be a country whose currency actually did have three decimal places: Cyprus.
After decimalisation of the Cyprus Pound in 1955, it was divided into 1000 mils. (This was simplified in 1983 to 100 cents before Cyprus joined the euro in 2008.) £3.456 was read as "Three pounds, four hundred and fifty-six mils".
The only other currency I know of where there were subdivisions of a "cent" is the Pound Sterling, where prior to 1971 a penny was subdivided into four farthings and from 1971 to 1984 into two halfpennies. However those fractions were actually represented as fractions like ¾ and ½, and were read as "x pence three-farthing" or "x-and-a-half pence".
answered Dec 23, 2018 at 0:05
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1According to ISO-4217, there are 7 countries using 3 digits for their currency minor units: Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Libya, Oman and Tunisia. Commented Dec 23, 2018 at 0:59
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Regardless if such a subdivision exists as as physical unit of currency, such quantities of money can be transacted. For example, gasoline is always quoted as a usual price then has a cleverly disguised 9/10 on the sign. So if the first three digits on the sign say 2.71, then the actual price is 2.719. You get some number of units, then when you actually need to pay it is rounded. That 0.009 racks up cents quickly of course since it is not far off from 0.01. Commented Dec 23, 2018 at 2:01
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@michael.hor257k Interesting. There are two with 4 decimals (Uruguay and Chile). Commented Jan 23 at 22:50