Learn French Language Guide - Learn French Grammar

French numbers come in two flavors: cardinal (e.g. un, deux, trois… / one, two, three…) and ordinal (e.g. premier, deuxième, troisième… / first, second, third…).  The good thing is that, apart from premier / first, ordinal numbers use their cardinal cousins as roots, in most cases merely adding a –ième ending to them. 

1.  Cardinal Numbers: 

Cardinal French numbers can be divided in two: numbers which are unique words and numbers which are a combination of other numbers.

Unique Numbers:  from zero to sixteen, all numbers are unique words. So are the tens from 20 to 60.  After that, hundreds use the unique base cent, thousands use mille, millions use million like English and billions use milliard.

† Note that even though 40, 50 and 60 are unique words, their roots are still quite recognizable (e.g. quatre for quarante, cinq for cinquante and six for soixante).

* Here the x in soixante is pronounced like the s in the word sound.

Numbers built on Combinations of other Numbers:  the words for the remaining French numbers, at least up to 999 billion, use different combinations of the 26 numbers above.

#  First combination:  17, 18 and 19 use the words for ten (e.g. dix) and the words for seven, eight and nine (e.g. sept, huit and neuf). 

#  Second combination:  numbers from 21 to 69, except those ending with a 1        (e.g. 21, 31, 41, 51 and 61), use a combination of the words for the corresponding   tens and units (e.g. vingt – deux / twenty-two,  trente – trois / thirty-three, quarante – quatre / forty-four, etc…).  This is the same construction as English (e.g. twenty - two,  thirty - three,  forty - four, etc…).  For the 5 numbers ending with a 1, it is necessary to add –et– / –and– between the two words.  This addition of –et– also holds for 71 -- but not 81 and 91 -- even though the rules governing it are different.           

#  Third combination:  numbers from 70 to 79 behave as if you’d started counting again at sixty.  70 is soixante-dix / sixty-ten, 71 soixante-et-onze / sixty-eleven, 72 soixante-douze / sixty-twelve, etc…         

#  Fourth combination:  80 doesn’t follow on from 70.  Instead, 80 uses a   figurative multiplication: quatre-vingts, literally four-twenties (or four times   twenty). As with the 70’s, the 80’s behave as if the counter was reset, this time at 80. 80 is quatre-vingts / four-twenties, 81 quatre-vingts-un / four-twenties-one, 82 quatre-vingts-deux / four-twenties-two, etc…         

The 90’s follow on from the 80’s in the same way the 70’s continued on from the 60’s; this time the counter continues from 80:

#  Fifth combination:  hundreds are built around cent.  From 100 to 199, numbers use the following formula: cent + number with number being drawn from the 100 numbers we’ve already seen.