Language Tip 5
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AbelSanchezALanguage Tip 5
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AbelSanchezALanguage tip #5
Numerals
Take‐home message: For English texts, numerals must be formatted the English
way: points for decimals, commas for orders of magnitude.
Numerals are the graphic representations of numbers. As such, numerals
are linguistic units, and their formatting follows a set of conventions that
can differ between communities. You MUST follow the conventions of the
language you are writing in.
English and Spanish differ in the characters used to separate decimals and
to group digits in large numbers. The rule is simple: where you would use
a comma in Spanish, you use a point (period) in English, and vice versa.
But it’s worth looking in a bit more detail, because this has important
implications, and there are other ways of formatting numerals that you
should be aware of.
Decimals
In English, decimal fractions are indicated with a point. So ‘three and a
half’ is represented 3.5 . It can NEVER be written 3,5 ; this is meaningless
in an English language text.
Worse than meaningless is if you write 3,547 when you mean ‘tres coma
cinco cuatro siete’. What you will have written in fact means ‘tres mil
quinientos cuarenta y siete’.
Large numbers
For large numbers, the tradition in English is to separate groups of three
digits with commas. Thus ‘one thousand’ is 1,000 , ‘ten thousand three
hundred and twenty‐one’ is 10,321 , and ‘three million’ is 3,000,000 . Note
that there are no spaces.
Clearly, moving from Spanish to English here carries the same risk of
confusion as with decimal fractions but in reverse. If you intend ‘diez mil
trescientos veintiuno’ and write 10.321 you have in fact written ‘ten point
three two one (diez coma tres dos uno)’.
English‐speaking readers will be doubly confused if you write 10.321,7
when you mean ‘ten thousand three hundred and twenty‐one and seven
tenths’. It should of course be 10,321.7 .
Language tip #5
Note that the convention for separating digits in large numbers does not
apply to long decimal fractions. Here, you should leave digits ungrouped
or, for very long numbers, group with points. Thus while 106 = 1,000,000 ,
10‐6 = 0.000001 or 0.000.001 , though in these cases you are more likely to
use scientific notation anyway.
So far, so easy; all you need to do is switch your commas for points and
your points for commas. It’s that simple.
However, you are likely to come across other systems. The Council of
Science Editors recommends that four‐digit numbers be written without a
comma or a space: 1000 , 3547 . You can do this, but it’s OK to follow
tradition and include the comma. Another CSE recommendation is that for
larger numbers (five digits and more), a narrow space be used to separate
groups of three numbers: 1 000 000 .
You are sure to see this style in print, but you don’t need to worry about
it. In your texts you can just use points and commas the traditional way;
I’ve not seen author instructions that specify otherwise. If the target
journal for your article needs to convert your 10,321 to 10 321 , this can
be done during production.
Although you might have some difficulties with tables created in a Spanish
version of Excel, it is trivially easy to format numbers correctly for an
English text in a Word document, so please do so. If you don’t, you are
writing in Spanish, just as if you wrote out the number in words: 3,5
means ‘tres coma cinco’; it does not mean ‘three point five’.