Cheques, legal documents, invoices, certificates and formal letters often want an amount written out in words as well as in figures. It is a safeguard: “1,000” is easy to alter into “10,000” with a pen, while “one thousand” is not. Writing long numbers out by hand is slow and the place where mistakes creep in. Paste your numbers here and the tool writes them for you.
Put one number on each line. A list of amounts converts in one go.
Three ways to write a number
Words is the plain version: 42 becomes “forty-two”, 1,234 becomes “one thousand two hundred thirty-four”, 1,000,000 becomes “one million”. A decimal is read digit by digit after the word “point”, so 3.14 is “three point one four”. A negative number starts with “minus”.
Ordinal gives the position form: 1 becomes “first”, 22 becomes “twenty-second”, 101 becomes “one hundred first”. Ordinals use the whole-number part only, so any decimal is ignored.
Money writes the number as an amount, splitting off the cents: 125.50 becomes “one hundred twenty-five dollars and fifty cents”. You can change “dollars” and “cents” to euros, pounds, pence or anything else. One dollar is written in the singular. A figure with no cents leaves them out. The tool takes the first two decimal places and does not round, so 1.999 gives “one dollar and ninety-nine cents”, and you should round beforehand if you want it otherwise.
Style choices
The numbers follow American usage: “one hundred twenty-three” with no “and”. British usage often adds one: “one hundred and twenty-three”. If your document needs that style, you can add the “and” by hand after “hundred”. Hyphens join the compound numbers from 21 to 99, as in “twenty-one”, which is the standard rule, and you can turn them off for a space. There is also a tick box to capitalise the first letter, handy for the start of a sentence or a line on a cheque.
Limits and checks
Numbers can have up to 21 digits, which is just under a sextillion, and the tool will say if one is too large. Anything that is not a plain number, such as “twelve” or “1/2”, is reported as not a number. Commas as thousands separators are accepted. Scientific notation (1e6) is not.
When this is used for cheques and contracts, check the result against the figure before you rely on it, and follow whatever your bank or jurisdiction requires. Those rules sometimes call for a specific format, for example “and 00/100” for the cents, which is not generated here.
The tool goes the other way round, from text to number, in a limited sense with Roman numerals: the Roman numeral converter. To pull numbers out of a block of text first, use the number extractor, which also totals them, and to take numbers out of text, remove numbers. For capitalising the result, the case converter will do all of it at once.