About spelling numbers out
The amount-in-words line on a cheque exists for one reason: digits can be altered, and words are much harder to alter convincingly. A 1 becomes a 7 with one stroke of a pen; "one thousand" does not become "seven thousand" without obvious tampering.
The same logic keeps it on invoices, contracts, purchase orders and legal documents long after cheques stopped being common. And it is exactly the sort of thing nobody wants to write by hand, because the awkward cases — 71, 80, 90, anything past a million — are the ones that are easy to get wrong.
Type the numbers, one per line, and get them back in words. Nothing is uploaded.
Ten languages, and why that is not just a translation
This is not one algorithm with ten word lists. Two genuinely different counting systems are implemented, because a string table cannot bridge them.
Thousands — English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Dutch group by thousands: thousand, million, billion. Within that, each language has its own corners. German and Dutch write the unit before the ten and run the whole number into one word. French says soixante-dix for 70 and quatre-vingt-dix for 90, and the -s on quatre-vingts disappears the moment another number follows. Spanish contracts to veintiuno and distinguishes cien from ciento.
Myriads — Japanese, Chinese and Korean group by ten thousands: 万 is 10,000 and 億 is 100,000,000. So 1,200,000 is not "one million two hundred thousand" but 百二十万 — a hundred-and-twenty myriad. The grouping itself is different, not just the words.
How to use it
- Choose the language. It starts on the language of the page you are reading
- Type or paste your numbers, one per line — a whole column from a spreadsheet works
- Pick plain words, or cheque style to get the cents as a fraction
- Copy the result, or download it as a text file
Blank lines stay blank, so the output lines up with the input if you paste a column back into a spreadsheet.
Cheque style
The convention on a cheque is to write the whole amount in words and the fraction as a numeral over 100: one thousand two hundred and thirty-four and 56/100.
That is what cheque style produces. It works from the decimal part of what you typed, and pads a single decimal place to two — 12.5 becomes and 50/100, not and 5/100, which is the mistake that changes the amount by a factor of ten.
What people use it for
- Filling in the amount in words on a cheque or a bank draft
- Adding the written total to an invoice or a quotation
- Writing figures out in a contract or a legal document
- Producing a column of written amounts for a mail merge
- Checking how a number is correctly spelled in a language you are writing in
- Teaching or learning number words in another language
Good to know
- Works everywhere — it is a web page with no upload and no dependency, so it runs on any phone, tablet or computer
- Numbers up to about 9 quadrillion are exact. Above that a browser can no longer represent whole numbers precisely, so the tool says the number is too large rather than printing a subtly wrong amount
- Decimals in plain style are read digit by digit — 1.25 is "one point two five", the way a number is read aloud
- Negative numbers get the right word for the language: minus, moins, menos, マイナス
- Thousands separators and spaces in the input are ignored, so 1,234,567 and 1234567 both work
- Currency names are deliberately not added. "Dollars", "euros" or "rupees" belongs to your document, not to the number
Related tools
- Invoice Generator — put the written amount straight onto an invoice
- Roman Numeral Converter — a different way of writing numbers
- Number Base Converter — binary, octal, decimal and hex
- Unit Converter — convert the quantity before spelling it
