I have seen "one thousand one" and "one thousand and one", but all due respect to Dr. Noll, I am not sure if I have ever seen "one thousand, one" or any other number spelled out with a comma in modern times, although I can brook correction on that count. In other words, I wouldn't take this web page as the final word on number naming. English naming conventions for numbers is an interesting subject. There is a definite split along British/American lines. I believe that in Britain (correct me), the use of "and" is more or less universal in both spoken and written numbers (two thousand three hundred and seventeen), whereas in America, there is a formalism introduced some time in the last century in which the "and" was dropped (two thousand three hundred seventeen). The latter predominates in written material and in formal speech. In casual speech, the "and" form is more common, or else a shortened form (twenty-three seventeen). I believe the "andless" formalism was introduced in America circa 1900 (don't quite me). As I have heard it spoken, "and" is used as follows: (1) Within a block of three digits, to separate positive hundreds from a positive remainder, as in "three hundred and forty-seven" or "five hundred and one thousand six hundred and thirty-eight"; and (2) in a number of two or more blocks, before the last block if its value is between 1and 99, as in "one thousand and one" or "seventy-five million and thirty-eight". There is also the British use of the word "naught" (nought) for zero. In a numerical context, I understand this to be more of a name for the digit itself (similar to "cipher"), than for the number it represents, I am not sure if it is ever used to name a number. In America, the digit and the number are "zero." The meaning "nothing" for "naught" survives in America, but is obsolescent. The Americans corrupted "naught" to "aught" (ought) in times past: the year 1906 would have been abbreviated to '06 and spoken "aught eight". The .30-06 Springfield rifle, invented in 1906, is still called a "thirty aught six". In modern speech, "oh" is commonly used for the digit zero. There is also the famous divergence between British and Amercan zillions. The British zillions are based on blocks of six digits (base 1000000), the American on blocks of three digits (base 1000), the zillion names (thousand, million, billion, etc.) coincide. Formal zillion names extend to the vigintillion (British 10^120, American 10^63), Conway's system, based on a formal extension of the Greek zillion names, ostensibly names any positive integer (I am not fully convinced that Conway does not eventually run out of Greek prefixes), at any rate, Conway's system is at present a curiosity and not a standard; we have rare need and little motivation to name numbers so large that speaking them would consume entire lifetimes. On 9/25/2011 9:24 PM, Robert Munafo wrote:
Car Talk, huh? Who knew.
Landon Curt Noll [1] is a fairly well respected computer scientist and mathematician (sort of) who worked with John Horton Conway on the system for names of arbitrarily high powers of 1000 which was published in (Conway and (Richard K) Guy)'s book "The Book of Numbers" [2]. So he ought to know.
Noll published a Perl script that formats integers into English names, and an online version is here:
http://www.isthe.com/cgi-bin/number.cgi
He spells "1001" as "one thousand, one" and similarly for everything up to 999999. For example 27101 is "twenty seven thousand, one hundred one" which has 11+8+13=32 letters and one comma. You can try more examples on the website.