Polish vocabulary - numbers

The number 10 is dziesięć (pron. jeshyench). The suffix teen is translated into Polish as -naście (pron. nashcheh). To make a number 11-19, you just need to take a number and add naście at the end (and avoid doubling the consonant, if a number ends with -n). However, sometimes you need to add/remove/change another letter to make it sound properly. The numbers that follow the regular rules are:

And here are the exceptions:

We create the numbers 20, 30 etc. by taking the number of tens and adding -dzieścia (for 20 only, pron. gestuh) -dzieści (for 30 & 40, pron. jesh-chea) or -dziesiąt (for everything else, pron. jesh-awn't). If there's ć between the two parts (in 50, 60 and 90), we can ignore it when speaking, so instead of saying sześćdziesiąt we would say sześdziesiąt. That's not the correct spelling though.

To make numbers like 34, 65, 87, we do the same thing as in English. Let's say we'd like to create the number 34. In English, we would take thirty and add four at the end. In Polish the word for thirty is trzydzieści, and the word for four is cztery. So we combine those together and create trzydzieści cztery, which means 34. It works this way for every number from 21 to 99.

Hundred in Polish is sto. To make a word describing the amount of hundreds, we do very similar thing to when we'd like to create a number of tens. To the numbers 500-900 we add the suffix -set. To the numbers 300 and 400, we add the suffic -sta.

It's more complicated with 100 and 200. In English, 100 is one hundred or a hundred. In Polish, we don't need to tell that there's exactly one hundred, so saying sto is correct and only correct way.

200 is dwieście (pron. dvyeah-shche). And this thing you must remember.

To create numbers like 534, 621, 990 - just divide it into two parts. For 258, divide it into 200 and 58. 200 is dwieście, and 58 is pięćdziesiąt osiem. Now combine them together and you've got dwieście pięćdziesiąt osiem, which means two hundred and fifty eight. No word for and is needed in any Polish number (except for some fractions, but I'll tell about that later on).

Thousand in Polish is tysiąc (pron. t-shawnts). And like hundreds, millions, billions etc, we don't need to tell the amount if it equals 1. So 1000 is just tysiąc, not jeden tysiąc.

The rest is very simple. If the number of thousands ends with 2, 3 or 4, but it's not the teen number (12, 13 and 14 - because they end with -naście and not dwa, trzy, or cztery), we add the word tysiące (pron. t-shawntseh) after that.So 3000 is trzy tysiące, and 732000 is siedemset trzydzieści dwa tysiące.

For everything else, we add tysięcy (pron. t-shentsey) instead. 468000 - czterysta sześćdziesiąt osiem tysięcy; 75000 - siedemdziesiąt pięć tysięcy; 712000 - siedemset dwanaście tysięcy. And now you probably know how to read the current year in Polish :D

In English, after millions, we've got: billions, trillions, quadrillions etc. In Polish, we need to use another "scale" of making big numbers. Look at the table to understand it:

So, as you can see, before moving to the next group of llions, Polish uses lliards as a group "between" the continuous groups, which makes the Polish bilion a larger number, than English billion.

But we also need to know how to decline these number according to how many of these are there. Here's the table to help with that:

So the point is basically to add -y to every number in the 2nd group, and -ów to every number in the 3rd group. The same thing applies to other big numbers - tryliard, kwadrylion, kwadryliard etc.

Polish googol is the same as English googol - it's 10 raised to the 100th power, as well as googolplex - 10 raised to the power of googol.

A point is not used as a decimal separator in Polish. Instead, it uses commas. So 3.25 would be actually 3,25. If so, how do they separate every three digits in large numbers? The answer is... points. Many people use spaces instead though, but it's also correct to use points.

A comma in Polish is przecinek (pron. pshech-eeneck), and a point is kropka (pron. cropcar in BrE / crawpkuh in AmE - the British pronunciation is more accurate). Kropka is never used in reading numbers.

There are three ways of reading fractions in Polish. The first one is to tell the integer part, then przecinek, and then to read every digit by its own. E.g. - 56,5029 would be pięćdziesiąt sześć przecinek pięć zero dwa dziewięć.

For smaller numbers, we can just say the number in the fraction. E.g. - 781,18 can be siedemset osiemdziesiąt jeden przecinek osiemnaście, or siedemset osiemdziesiąt jeden przecinek jeden osiem - both are correct.

The 3rd way is to take the 2nd way, replace przecinek with i (which means and), remove zero from before the comma (if it's there, plus, remove i in this case) and add an ordinal numeral at the end. Which to use - it depends on the number of digits in the decimal expansion. For one - we'll take 10, for two - 100, for three - 1000 etc. Here's the table showing how to make the ordinal numerals:

Since these numerals are in feminine gender, we need to change the dwa word, if appears at the end, to dwie.

Examples: 4,62 - cztery i sześćdziesiąt dwie setne; 0,125 - sto dwadzieścia pięć tysięcznych; 53,053 - pięćdziesiąt trzy i pięćdziesiąt trzy tysięczne; 1,1151 - jeden i tysiąc sto pięćdziesiąt jeden dziesięciotysięcznych.

If a fraction has a period (e.g. 0,33333... or 0,(3)), we say the digits and add w okresie. If there's a "normal" part before the period part, we add an i.

Examples: 0,(3) - zero przecinek trzy w okresie; 5,(25) - pięć przecinek dwa(dzieścia) pięć w okresie; 1,67(23) - jeden przecinek sześć(dziesiąt) siedem i dwadzieścia trzy w okresie; 0,050(06) - zero przecinek zero pięćdziesiąt i zero sześć w okresie OR zero przecinek zero pięć zero i zero sześć w okresie.

Just add the word minus (pronun. mean-ous) at the very beginning to the positive equivalent.

Disclaimer: Vocative, for numbers below 1000, is always the same, as nominative - that's why it's not shown.

One and two have different forms for different genders. Here are the tables for them:

Other numerals have the same forms for every gender (except for accusative - the feminine form is always the same as nominative). Here is the table showing the declination:

And from now on, the vocative case is different from the nominative.

There are also ordinal and collective numerals, but I'd like to write about them later. I will just say that collective numerals are used to count: nouns with only plural form, immature people or things with different genders. They are often ended with -ioro.