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I have been reading "Gulliver's Travels" (Otherwise known more verbosely as "Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships"), and I have noticed that two-digit numbers are often written in the "German" style, that is it say that the "tens" place is written after the "ones" place.

I marked one example recently, but I have seen several others. From page 125 of the Collins Classics (2010) edition:

"No law of that country must exceed in words the number of letters in their alphabet, which consists only in two-and-twenty."

Some interior shots of the first edition show that the writing, apart from some minor differences still looks very much like contemporary English.

So my question is why the numbers are written like this. Was it common at the time for English speakers to say numbers this way? When did it change?

wfgeo
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    4+20 – TaW Apr 22 '19 at 06:57
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    what a perfect place to discuss endianness – 12Me21 Apr 22 '19 at 18:48
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    English is a Germanic language. It was only after prolonged contact with other languages (like French) that we started saying numbers the wrong way (yes, I thnk languages and microprocessors should all be little-endian :-). – Lee Daniel Crocker Apr 22 '19 at 20:36
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    @LeeDanielCrocker:The German way, achthundertvierundsechzig, is middle-endian, neither fish nor fowl. Eight hundred four and sixty. An abomination, in my opinion. I don't know of any language that is truly little-endian. – TonyK Apr 22 '19 at 23:42
  • And then there's Abraham Lincoln's rendition of "87" in his 1863 Gettysburg Address: "Four score and seven." – Sven Yargs Apr 24 '19 at 07:28
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    It's interesting that this inversion on exists with numbers greater than twenty. You get "three and twenty", "two and forty", "seven and thirty" and so on but I've never seen or heard "five and ten" instead of fifteen. – BoldBen Dec 02 '19 at 18:07
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    @BoldBen Doesn't the five come first in 'fif-teen'? – Mitch Dec 02 '19 at 21:08
  • @BoldBen And what about the old name for an emporium like Woolworth's - the "five-and-dime store"? ;) – MT_Head Dec 03 '19 at 00:34
  • @TaW - There are a couple of pie shops in Los Angeles called "Four n' 20", after the nursery rhyme. For the longest time, I thought it was a marijuana reference, but apparently not. – MT_Head Dec 03 '19 at 00:39
  • @mitch That's true but, if the 'and' ever existed in the name of the number if disappeared a very long time ago. Also the traditional sheep-counting number systems which seem to date back to before the Anglo-Saxon takeover from their similarity to Welsh usually have numbers of the form one-ten, two-ten and so on without the "and". – BoldBen Dec 03 '19 at 15:30
  • @MT_Head That's completely different. It refers to the only two prices in the store. In the UK Woolworths called themselves "The threepence and sixpence store" which was the Sterling equivalent. – BoldBen Dec 03 '19 at 15:34
  • @BoldBen I don't think the 'and' is as remarkable as the order reversal. – Mitch Dec 03 '19 at 16:22
  • @BoldBen I was aware of that; hence the winky emoticon. – MT_Head Dec 03 '19 at 21:12
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    @MT_Head Sory, I didn't spot it. Comes of contributing to ELU using a 9 inch tablet instead of a proper computer ;-) – BoldBen Dec 04 '19 at 22:15

4 Answers4

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Putting the ones place before the tens place was formerly the primary way to discuss two-digit numbers like twenty-two. The Oxford English Dictionary, under "twenty, adj. and n.," lists the Old English translation of his Histories:

c893 tr. Orosius Hist. vi. ii. 256 Þara twa & twentigra monna þe he him to fultume hæfde acoren.

In Early Modern English the two forms are both used. The OED cites an example with the form we're more familiar with now:

1526 Proclam. 5 Nov. in Pat. Roll 18 Hen. VIII ii. m. 2 d The Soueraygne..shalbe curraunt..for twenty two shillynges and sixe pens.

As this previous StackExchange answer suggests, the Norman French influence shifted the order of numbering. Germanic numbering was finally supplanted around 1700, though dialects preserved the usage. Furthermore, literary authors sometimes tapped into the antiquated sense of the phrasing. For instance, even in the 20th century William Butler Yeats wrote If I Were Four-and-Twenty.

TaliesinMerlin
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    It's also common in Dickens, as far as I remember. – egreg Apr 21 '19 at 17:59
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    The Yeats isn’t an example of “dialects preserved the usage”, but rather shows how it lived on in literary and poetic usage, and indeed still does — used both by good writers for deliberate archaic effect (or similar), and by bad writers because they think it makes their work more literary. – PLL Apr 21 '19 at 18:33
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    I've seen this type of usage in Sherlock Holmes too – ColonD Apr 22 '19 at 13:06
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    @PLL That's fair; I've adjusted my answer to reflect that. – TaliesinMerlin Apr 22 '19 at 13:12
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    See a few examples from Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/1190676-how-old-were-they – swbarnes2 Apr 22 '19 at 20:37
  • Four and twenty is the number of blackbirds backed in a pie, which predates Yeats a fair bit. More familiar to generations of young British males (although certainly not politically correct) is the similar number of virgins that came down from Inverness. Not doubt you can find what happened to them by surfing the internet. – David Dec 02 '19 at 22:44
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This was quite common (for some numbers) among my parents generation when I was young, so I think it has only died out recently. (If it has. I certainly haven't heard it for a very long time.)

There is also the children's nursery rhyme "Sing a Song of Sixpence" which has the line "Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie". This might have helped preserve that style of numbering.

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    "This was quite common (for some numbers) among my parents' generation when I was young". That is my experience, too (in the UK). Times of day were often given like this, e.g. "five and twenty past three". – Philip Wood Apr 21 '19 at 13:11
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    Can you clarify what “for some numbers” means? I don’t suppose they went around counting sixty-one, two and sixty, sixty-three – which type(s) of numbers would tend to have the Germanic order as more likely variants? – Janus Bahs Jacquet Apr 21 '19 at 14:10
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    I mainly remember it being used for numbers between 20 and 30, but it may have also been used less frequently for things like "5 and 90". (This could also be related to the appallingly complicated pre-decimal currency in use at the time.) –  Apr 21 '19 at 16:31
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    "Four-and-twenty blackbirds baked in a pie" – Michael Harvey Apr 22 '19 at 09:31
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    @Philip Wood - my mother, born 1920 in London, used to say "five-and-twenty" past, or to, an hour, but my father, born the same year in Derby, said "twenty-five". The usage was confined to times only. Nobody said "three-and-forty shillings". – Michael Harvey Apr 22 '19 at 09:34
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    @JamesRandom the relationship with pre-decimal currency was different: "two and six" meant two shillings and sixpence. – pjc50 Apr 22 '19 at 10:58
  • Not to mention the four-and-twenty virgins who made a more recent journey from the Highlands. – David Apr 27 '19 at 21:28
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I am a very old man and my parents was born in England in the last decade of the 18th century. As a child we used to say five and twenty past two instead of twenty-five past two. I used to hear people say twice and thrice. Now it is much more common to say two times two is four instead of twice two is four. I never hear Americans use the word "twice".

Aled Cymro
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    "Twice" occurs all the time in American English, but not in that context. Usually it's used in sentences like "He knocked twice on the door." or something to that effect. It's not generally used in the mathematical sense though, more just to describe something happening two times. "Thrice" is pretty rare though. – Darrel Hoffman Apr 25 '19 at 03:19
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/18th_century – Řídící Apr 27 '19 at 14:26
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The King James Version of 1769 (arguably, this is the influence of the 1611 translation) contains the unusual gem :

So when they had rowed five and twenty or thirty furlongs ... [John 6:19]

This seems an exceedingly odd way to approximate, to me, but it may be a peculiarity of the Greek text and the translators' desire to be faithful to the original.

Nigel J
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