Number to Words Converter

Why this exists

Writing a number in words sounds like something nobody should need a tool for. Then you're holding a pen over a cheque for 18,947.60 and you can't remember whether forty has a U in it. Or you're writing a rental contract in Spanish, where the law wants the amount spelled out, and you're not completely sure if it's veintiún or veintiuno.

I looked at the number to words converters that were already out there before building this one. Most only do English. A few do cheque wording but only for one currency, usually rupees or US dollars. Hardly any get the grammar right once you leave English, and the grammar is the whole point. French has its plural rules for quatre-vingts and deux cents. German glues a number into one long word. Chinese banking has its own set of anti-fraud characters. If you're going to put the result on a legal document, close enough isn't good enough.

So this one handles seven languages properly: English, Spanish, German, French, Brazilian Portuguese, Japanese and Simplified Chinese. All three modes work in each of them.

The three modes

Receipts often need the amount spelled out too. Copy the wording from here into the receipt generator and you're done.

Words is the plain one. 1,234 becomes one thousand two hundred thirty-four. Decimals are read digit by digit after the word point, so 3.14 is three point one four. Negative numbers work too. It goes up to 15 digits before the decimal point, which gets you just short of 1,000 trillion. If you need more than that for an actual document, you've got an interesting job.

Cheque amount gives you the wording for the amount line, along with the currency. In English you get two versions: "One thousand two hundred thirty-four dollars and fifty-six cents" and the shorter form banks in the US and Canada are used to, "One thousand two hundred thirty-four and 56/100 dollars". Pick whichever fits the line on your cheque. If there are no cents, the first version ends in "only", which makes it harder for anybody to squeeze extra words in afterwards.

Ordinal turns a number into its position: first, twenty-second, one hundred third. You also get the short form next to it, like 22nd. People need this for contract clauses, anniversaries, formal invitations and the odd bit of code. In Spanish and Portuguese it stops at 999,999, since nobody really writes those forms past that point.

What the options do

If you need Title Case or some other format for the result, run it through the case converter afterwards.

The British and tick box adds the "and" that people in the UK, Ireland, Australia and India expect, so 105 reads one hundred and five rather than one hundred five. American style leaves it out. Neither one is wrong, it just depends on who's reading. The box only appears for English.

Indian numbering switches to lakh and crore, so 1,50,000 comes out as one lakh fifty thousand and 2,50,00,000 as two crore fifty lakh. Choosing rupees as the currency ticks this for you, and the cheque wording follows the usual Indian layout: Rupees, then the amount, then only at the end.

UPPER CASE is there because plenty of people fill in cheques and bank forms in capitals. It's not a separate conversion, just a display switch, and it handles accented letters and the German ß correctly.

A few real situations

If the amount is going on a bill rather than a cheque, the invoice generator builds the whole document for you, and you can paste the words in as a note.

A small landlord writing a lease needs the deposit in words next to the figure, because that's how the template works. A number that's written both ways is harder to dispute, and in plenty of countries the words win if the two ever disagree.

An accounts clerk in Mumbai types 12,75,000 and needs "Rupees twelve lakh seventy-five thousand only" for a payment voucher. A freelancer in Lyon needs "mille deux cents euros" on an invoice, and has been told at some point that deux cents takes an s but deux cent un doesn't. A bookkeeper in Sao Paulo needs "mil duzentos e trinta e quatro reais e cinquenta e seis centavos" for a receipt. Somebody in Shenzhen needs 壹仟贰佰叁拾肆元伍角陆分 on a payment form, because the ordinary 一二三 can be altered with a stroke of a pen.

Then there's the student who just wants to check a homework answer, the teacher making a worksheet, and the developer who needs the expected output for a unit test. It all works the same way.

The language details I sweated over

Spanish: uno shortens before a noun, so you get veintiún euros and treinta y un mil, and you get un millón de euros with the de, but un millón doscientos mil euros without it. Spanish billón means a million million, not a thousand million. The tool uses mil millones for that, which is correct and catches English speakers out all the time.

French: quatre-vingts and deux cents only keep their s when they end the number. So it's quatre-vingts euros but quatre-vingt-un euros, and deux cents euros but deux cent mille euros. Millions and milliards are nouns, so they keep their plural. Spelling follows the traditional hyphen rules, and I've used soixante-dix and quatre-vingt-dix. If you're in Belgium or Switzerland, you'd say septante and nonante in speech, but the standard form is still accepted on documents.

German: everything below a million is written as one word, and the first letter stays small unless it starts a sentence. Above that, Million and Milliarde are separate nouns with capitals. The number one has three forms, and it matters: eins on its own, ein Euro before a noun, eine Million. Swiss amounts use Franken and Rappen, though you may want to swap ß for ss by hand in Switzerland.

Portuguese: this follows Brazilian usage, so 1,000,000,000 is um bilhão. In Portugal the same number is mil milhões, which is worth knowing if your document is going to Lisbon. The word e goes where Brazilian grammar puts it, as in mil e cem but mil duzentos e trinta.

Japanese: the cheque mode uses 壱, 弐, 参 and 拾, the characters used in formal documents, with 金 at the start and 也 at the end. The plain words mode uses normal kanji. Large numbers group by 万, 億 and 兆 rather than by thousands.

Chinese: the cheque mode follows the mainland rules for 大写金额: 壹贰叁肆伍陆柒捌玖, with 拾佰仟万亿, 零 in the right places, and 整 when there's nothing after 元 or 角. So 1,409.02 comes out as 壹仟肆佰零玖元零贰分 and 10 as 壹拾元整.

Commas, dots and how your number gets read

1,234 means a thousand and something in the US and one and a bit in Germany, which is a nasty way to get a cheque wrong. The tool reads your input using the conventions of the language you've chosen, and it tells you what it understood right under the result. If the small line says something you didn't mean, type the number without any thousand separators and you'll remove the doubt. Spaces, apostrophes (the Swiss 1'234.50) and currency symbols are ignored, so you can paste a figure straight out of a spreadsheet or invoice.

Limits and a sensible warning

There's no bank in the world that promises to accept a particular wording, and local rules vary. In the US, for example, a line through the empty space on the amount line is common practice. In France, a cheque must be written in euros with the amount in full. So read the result before you write it down, the same way you'd check anything else with money attached. For anything legally binding, the wording your bank or lawyer asks for beats what any website says.

Privacy

The whole conversion happens in JavaScript inside your browser tab. Amounts aren't uploaded, logged or stored, and the conversion makes no server call at all. Salary numbers, house deposits and invoice totals are nobody's business but yours.