Just last weekend I was flying back from London, and I overheard a Romanian flight attendant say to a British passenger that we’d be landing in Timișoara in 15 minutes, but he couldn’t tell whether she was saying 15 or 50 (and neither could I, although I knew we’d be landing soon). He then said, “one-five?” and she confirmed. As an English teacher I’ve come across many students (and other people) who otherwise speak good English, but fail to make the distinction between the -teen numbers and the -ty numbers.
Whoever invented English numbers didn’t really think it through, did they? All the numbers from 13 to 19 end in -teen, while all the multiples of ten from 20 to 90 end in -ty. So far, so simple. But -teen and -ty sound so similar! How do you know if someone is saying fifteen or fifty? And how can you make sure you’re saying fifteen and not fifty?
You might have read that the -ty numbers always have the stress on the first syllable (THIRty) while the -teen numbers always have the stress on the last syllable (thirTEEN). For the -ty numbers, that’s true. We always put the stress on the first syllable: THIRty, FORty, FIFty, and so on. But for the -teens, it’s more complicated than that. Here are a few examples:
- This shirt was SIXTEEN dollars. (When the number is followed by a plural noun, we tend to stress both syllables equally.)
- The train leaves at nine fifTEEN. (We usually stress the last syllable of a -teen number at the end of a sentence.)
- Eleven, twelve, THIRteen, FOURteen, FIFteen, … (We normally stress the first syllable of the -teens when counting; this is an example of contrastive stress which I’ll talk about in another post.)
- “How old is she? EighTEEN?” “Actually she’s NINEteen.” (Here we want to emphasise the difference between 18 and 19, so again we put contrastive stress on the first syllable.)
It’s complicated, isn’t it? In fact, until you get really really amazingly good at English, it’s probably too complicated. So what can you do to make sure you’re understood properly? Here are two simple tips for the -teens:
- There’s an N at the end for a reason. Pronounce it! SeventeeN!
- The last syllable contains a looong vowel sound. SeventeeeeeN! It’s a much longer sound than the one at the end of seventy.
If you just follow those two tips and don’t stress too much about stress, you should be fine. Bear in mind that even native English speakers mishear the -teen and -ty numbers from time to time.
Here I say thirteen pounds (£13) followed by thirty pounds (£30). Can you hear the difference?
This time I say fourteen dollars ($14) followed by forty dollars ($40):
Now I’m talking about two train delays:
We often need to use -teen and -ty numbers when talking about years, such as 1985 (nineteen eighty-five) or 1990 (nineteen ninety). The year 1990 is particularly tricky because “nineteen” and “ninety” sound very similar, and the N at the end of “nineteen” merges with the N at the beginning of “ninety”. Here is me saying nineteen ninety (1990):
And this is me saying the current year, twenty seventeen (2017). Note that if you say “two thousand and seventeen” instead, that’s perfectly fine.
I hope this has been helpful. If you have any questions about pronouncing numbers in English, feel free to leave a comment.