I’m living for the day when CS “bakes in” some code that can spell out integers below eleven.
Say, £${variable}, where if variable > 10 it prints the numeral and if variable < 11 (but >= 0) it writes out the word. (Yes, I know the £ sign is not easily accessible on most keyboards, so pick another symbol.)
So much better style-wise for fiction! So much clunkiness saved in coding for specific cases where we want to spell out numbers!
I will give you three hundred peanuts (no hyphen).
The arbitrary rule my English teacher gave me was that numbers twenty or below should be written out. Twenty-one and above should be numerals.(certain exceptions like starting a sentence of course) Until this very moment I had never questioned his rule.
That’s actually not what I wanted to post about though.
I recently listened to “Slaughterhouse Five” on Audible. There is a huge number in that book. I think it’s the number of lightyears between Earth and Trafalmadore. I don’t remember the number, but it was in the billions and not at all round. Something like 87,945,345,236. If I had been reading that book I wouldn’t really have noticed the number. I would have just skimmed over it noting that it was large and specific, and understanding that it meant the planets were very far apart.
Hearing an actor read each syllable of that number was something else entirely. It was specific, and it felt important like it was going to come up again. It didn’t, but then this was a novel, and it’s meant to be read more than heard.
I guess my point is that spelling out a large number might be a good way to make the reader pay attention to it. …if the details of that number are important.
So, I feel like for most people it kind of varies. For me if a small number isnt spelled out it looks bad like, “She had 3 apples.” Opposed to “She had three apples.” But if it’s a huge number like 300 I keep it as a number because it’s too long to write out. I have horror flash backs to German class when we learned number and it was like
1330 Einztousanddriehundertunddriezig or whatever like what? Lol, that’s just me tho, German has made me fear writing out big numbers.
German is great. There is no thrill like waiting for the German verb.
It’s a surprisingly practical language, for example vacuum cleaner, “Stabsauger”, literally means “dust sucker”.
Just tausenddreihundertdreißig. Calm down, Freundchen.
Really easy, here we go: tausend (one thousand) drei (three) hundert (hundred) dreißig (thirty). You read it as you see it. As if “one thousand three hundred and thirty” is any better.
I am not native so please DIGITS OR LATIN NUMBERS. Spelled means that I will 
Is it thousand hundred, hundreds of thousands, thousands millions…? 
Yeah, like many I’m a non-native English speaker, so I really prefer digits. For a small number like 0-10 it’s okay to write the number spelled out, but more than that, digits, please.
And besides being a non-native, I have Dyscalculia, I have issues reading the number spelled out in my own language, so it gets even worse in English 
xD I always add the und where it isn’t supposed to be! And the eins. Still can’t shake my english roots, the and (whatever number) is instilled into me.
I guess it doesn’t help that a billion has two separate values (1,000,000,000 or 1,000,000,000,000)… (And ditto for any larger number.) That said, if it’s just a billion, it would probably be easier to write than 1,000,000,000, and any reader will know that it’s basically just a large number with no real meaning beyond being large. (I suppose you could use scientific notation (1×10⁹), but I guess quite a few people wouldn’t be familiar with that…)
I’ve never heard of someone call a trillion a billion before.
Tell me about that the two main issues with grammar I have are prepositions ,(I will die before use correctly in on and at) and numbers
Well, the Wikipedia article basically begins right out of the gate with:
I’m surprised noone has mentioned alternative measure words, hand, dozen, score, century etc.
You can say five score (100), two hands (10), a half dozen (6) etc.
I have to agree that unless a number is rather large, I tend to ease towards writing numbers out in text.
Interesting exceptions might be pin codes or phone numbers, I think it would seem weird to me to not write those in numerics.
What the hell is hands and centuries mean hundreds of years in Spanish… Anglo-Saxon culture confusing me since forever.
It’s confusing me, too. 
I’ve never heard “hand” used as a number (as a distance, yes), and “century” is only used as a number in very specific circumstances (years, cricket scores, etc).
To expand on a point I made in passing earlier: do you need to specify the exact number? If I got two numbers in a story, one saying “about a billion”, and the other “1,014,928,287”, the second would give me no new information. Should I care that the last digit is “7”? I can’t see any reason why I should. I care that it’s a very big number, which could be good or bad (depending on context), but the exact number is meaningless. In this case, of course, a written word (“billion”) tells me all I need to know without any problems.
Now, I can see reasons why an author might include such numbers, but not directly in the text. For example, it can be done to show the difference between two characters: a pedant might give a far more precise answer than a more direct character. In this case, you would give “1,014,928,287” as a numeral, because reading “one billion, fourteen million…” is not going to be particularly fun, especially since the number itself tells the audience nothing.
A hand has 5 fingers, one hand = 5.
All my numbers are pretty small compared to the billions you guys are throwing out haha, but I’m glad people are taking this question into such great consideration! One number in my game, for instance, is 300. But it seems almost unanimous that people would rather see:
“I will give you 300 peanuts.”
rather than:
“I will give you three-hundred peanuts.”
Although its not a hard number to read, its just simpler to see 300.
I think the gray area is still eleven, 11, and twelve, 12. They are such short and unique numbers, as apposed to the teens, 13, but still higher than ten.
And a horse has four legs, but I hardly think that the equivalence of “horse” to four is enough to make the former a euphemism for the latter. 
Hands is also a unit of measurement, notably seen today in older books or sometimes in the context of @ParrotWatcher’s horses there. One hand is equal to about 10.16 cm—so two hands could also equal 20.32 cm.
Yeah I have read the hands measure in old books … But never as numbers.
No, but the equivalence of a horse with four legs is one “horsepower”. 
One of the first things humans ever counted was our fingers.