Numbers: US vs. UK

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Mark Elmer from San Antonio, Texas.

Hey, Mark, welcome to the show.

What’s up? What can we help with?

So what I wanted to ask y’all guys about is whether or not y’all guys have heard about the differences.

And this is personally relatable to me because I’m just about finishing out my math degree.

Whether or not y’all guys have heard about the differences between the way that people from America and from England use numbers.

And so what’s your interest in the British versus American?

Did you run up against this at a conference or something?

Friends and family of mine, particularly my current girlfriend, are actually from the U.K.

So it kind of rubs up in that sense.

And also it’s kind of an interesting thing because I spend my time looking about how people in different countries approach different numbers.

So it’s just something that I have personal interest in.

What did you notice so far?

Interestingly enough, and this is kind of one of those things where culture and language shape each other, American street numbers and British street numbers are very, very different.

So, for example, my address is 423, which is fairly high up in terms of numbers.

And it’s because of the way that our road system works, because we have our cities on grids, right?

So I live in the 400 block of my street.

Well, in Britain, a lot of these towns and cities predate the way that people set up grid systems.

So people have addresses that are more like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and the grid system doesn’t actually affect whatever number you get.

So it’d be like 5 Drury Lane or something.

Yeah, and it’s actually kind of amusing because I’ve never written an address to someone in America with a single number.

Like, I’ve occasionally seen double numbers, like 52 Main Avenue or something like that, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen in my entire life someone with the address 7.

And amusingly enough, smaller addresses are actually, in some cases, they’re desirable.

So the address 1 on a street is something that in the U.K. you can be proud about.

So people will pay a lot of money to get the property that corresponds with 1 on a street.

You hear it on the news.

There was a shooting last night in the 7200 block of Main Street, right?

And then you can actually supposedly figure out exactly where that was just by going counting over, counting down, and knowing roughly where that was.

Now, would a British speaker say the 7200 block?

Oh, yeah, that’s another interesting part, because we would say 7,200, but British speakers are more likely to say 7,200.

I mean, you can even go a little higher than that.

Let’s just talk about the abbreviations for mathematics.

The Americans say math, and the British say maths.

They keep the S from the original plural, and we don’t.

Yeah, my friend Justin is a mathematician here in this country, but he’s from Britain, and he says that he’s just stopped saying maths because people misunderstand him all the time.

They say mass.

What?

You’re studying to be a priest?

What?

Mass.

Oh, I see.

And, of course, we’ve got problems with imperial versus metric systems, right?

Well, and you talked about arriving at a building.

And when you go into the first floor, you’re not really on the first floor in Britain.

Oh, yeah, the European system.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You have to go up a floor to go to the first floor.

I learned that when I was in France.

It took quite a while to get used to the idea that the first floor wasn’t the ground floor.

Yeah.

But we’ve got other things on this as well.

The way they say phone numbers, they cluster them in groups of two, right, which we don’t do here.

I guess the double one, double two.

Right.

Well, not only that, but our phone number for the radio show is 877-929-9673.

In the U.K., we might be more likely to say 877…

We might cluster it a little bit so that you say 96 and 34 and things like that instead of pronouncing each number as an individual word.

Yeah, crazy.

By the way, there’s a really great video series on YouTube, which I would highly recommend if you don’t know about it already, called, was it Numero File, I believe?

P-H-I-L-E-S?

Oh, Number File?

Number Files, yeah.

I’m actually subscribed to that channel.

Oh, yeah.

They have a couple videos on British vs. American.

It’s really cool stuff.

Besides the whole thing, it’s like a perfect companion only on the number side to this radio show because they just geek out a little bit about numbers and conflicts over number and histories of numbers and traditions of numbers.

It’s funny because I think of math as being so empirical, but there are still all these differences that I didn’t realize.

Yeah.

It’s really interesting.

You have opened up a can of worms here, Mark.

I know we can barely touch this whole topic, but thanks for bringing it up.

Yeah, not a problem.

All right.

Good luck with the degree.

I’m glad to hear you’re finishing, and good luck with grad school.

Thank you very much.

You have a great time.

All right.

Take care.

Okay.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Call us at 877-929-9673 or send those emails to words@waywordradio.org.