Number to Words

1. 1Choose Money / cheque for amounts, or Plain number for any number.
2. 2Type the number; commas and spaces are ignored.
3. 3Pick the currency, the number system and whether to use British “and”.
4. 4Copy the words, the cheque line or the ordinal.

The number is read as text, not converted to a floating-point value, so large amounts and decimals are never rounded by accident. Whole numbers are split into groups of three digits and each group is written with its scale word: thousand, million, billion and so on (the short scale used in modern English).

In the Indian system the groups are thousand, lakh (1,00,000) and crore (1,00,00,000), with larger amounts written as a number of crores — so 12,34,56,789 is twelve crore thirty-four lakh fifty-six thousand seven hundred eighty-nine. Rupees default to this system.

British and Indian English put “and” before the last part (one hundred and five; one thousand and five); American usage on cheques usually leaves it out. Tens and units are hyphenated: twenty-one, ninety-nine.

Money is rounded half up to two decimal places. The cheque line uses the common format of the whole amount in words followed by the cents or pence as a fraction over 100, such as “and 05/100 dollars”, which is hard to alter.

1234.56 in US dollars

1. 1,234 → one thousand two hundred thirty-four
2. 0.56 → fifty-six cents
3. Cheque: … and 56/100 dollars

Result: One thousand two hundred thirty-four dollars and fifty-six cents.

• Check the requirements of the bank or form; some ask for “only” at the end, as in “… rupees only”.
• Write cheque amounts close to the left edge and fill the remaining space with a line.
• Make sure the amount in words matches the figures exactly; banks may refuse a cheque where they differ.
• Use the ordinal output for dates and rankings, such as twenty-first.