British Numbers confuse Americans - Numberphile

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I am from upstate New York I'm from downstate New York I Live Now in Brighton England and I live in London now so how long have you been in the UK 13 years so I've been living here for 10 years and I've spent a lot of that time working as a physics teacher in secondary schools so if you're giving somebody your phone number your credit card number and you've got two numbers in a row that are the same um so my uh number is 8844 at in my office the British way to say that would be 84 and it would have never occurred to me to say it that way I don't know about Americans in in general but I can say that uh for me when I moved to London I was really thrown by the double numbers thing for quite a while I would say 8844 I might say 8844 but I wouldn't say d84 when I moved here there were two problems right one one is the double numbers thing and the second thing is that people say the telephone numbers in a different pattern than they do us numbers so it was that that different pattern plus people saying things like five9 I had such a hard time uh getting those numbers the first time and and maybe it was maybe I'm just particularly slow the thing that always trips me up is I don't know whether to say triple when I get three of those things in a row so if I had a credit card that had three zeros in a row do I say triple zero do I say z0 do I say 0 0 do I say 00 I don't know what to say I I'd love to hear from uh British people and some instruction on how to read my credit card number off the top of my head I can't think of having ever heard triple but I wouldn't rule it out I don't I don't actually know perhaps uh perhaps your commenters can let us know if they say triple another example is what happens when you use numbers in the thousands or numbers with four digits the president's address that's called 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in American and I think most British people would be comfortable with that being 1,600 but when you get to a bigger number Americans are happy to say that is 5,300 a British person probably call this 5,300 you where I grew up on on uh downstate New York pretty much everybody around me would say 5300 like for example I know that that my parents will say uh 5,300 but for me as a kid I I always found that a confusing way to phrase that there there's something about it that just doesn't gel in my mind and and honestly it took me years and years to really get that and so in my mind when I hear someone say something like um 7200 I have to kind of think about it in terms of $100 bills right so so again if someone says like 5300 I have to visualize $530000 bills on a table for me I always consciously made an effort to say 5,300 instead of 5300 which do you think is more elegant 5300 or 5,300 well 5,300 is easier to understand I mean when I say 5300 I get confused myself whether I mean 5300 or 53,000 even though I think that 5300 is linguistically nicer right it sort of rolls off the tongue more easily but I I like the Precision in saying 5,300 but I was definitely uh going against the tide of of people that I lived around nevertheless I find it easy to say 50 when I'm thinking of numbers when I want to say how much something cost you deal with a $100 bills in America like it's not rare to come across $100 bills whereas I don't think there yeah now I'm not 100% sure but I don't think that there are 100b notes that are actually produced I think it stops at 50 and I have only incredibly rarely in my life ever seen someone actually use a 50 pound note and it's it's always it's always remarkable like at a bank I'll see someone pull out a 50 so so maybe that's why as an American it's it's easier to think in terms of amounts of $100 bills right I have I have $1,200 bills so that's ,200 I don't I don't know if that has anything to do with it but that might be why British people are not as comfortable with that kind of phrasing the second year of the 2000s was 2001 for for in American speech generally but in British speech that sounds weird that sounds American you'd say 200 And1 so 2001 2001 this is one of those cases where having lived in London for 10 years and in particular having taught in front of classes and being very used to speaking to British people all the time I can sometimes kind of forget these little phrases and and which way have I always said it and and just naturally thinking about it the 2001 or uh 2001 which way would I have said it when I was in New York I'm not 100% sure I think I would have said 2001 but it's it's one of those things that gets kind of lost when when you when you move from one country to another sometimes those little things can can just kind of you just become uncertain about how it was and then you feel like a crazy person right you feel like I should know how I used to say things but you you just lose it but I did I did look up after you mentioned the 2001 I wanted to see how Arthur C Clark actually says uh that number of course 2001 he's British and he says an interviews he says 2001 um as as the title for his book is the way he always phrased it I tried to find some audio of Stanley Kubrick saying the title of the movie but you know he's an incredibly secretive kind of guy and didn't do very many interviews about it and so I I was unable to find any clip of of Stanley Kubrick actually speaking aloud the name of of perhaps his most famous movie if you want to count out seconds um which people sometimes need to do uh an typical way of doing doing this is to have a word that you put in between your numbers to make it long enough that you've got a full second between the two numbers and the typical way to do this in American English or a typical way to do it is to use the word Mississippi so one Mississippi 2 Mississippi 3 Mississippi four Mississippi 5 Mississippi 6 Mississippi hopefully it's about a second I've never actually tested it I have no idea where where it comes from except that it's a it's a fun word to say and it's long so that seems like an obvious choice to go in the middle another way to do it is 1 1,000 2 1000 which you notice has a different number of syllables the 1 1000 2 1000 I think is found in both America and Britain um but then in in Britain you've got other ones like one Picadilly 2 Picadilly 3 Picadilly or one elephant two elephant three elephant I was trying to think about this and I don't think I've ever had the opportunity to hear any of my students C in this kind of way that you would do or you're intentionally doing second so I don't know what any of them would have said but you know the you asking me about this is basically the first time I've ever heard about Picadilly or elephant when I said one Mississippi two Mississippi that's how I learned it with that very specific sing song kind of Rhythm to help you count out the seconds and because I've only done this on the blog I've not actually heard people say one Picadilly two padilly I'm not quite sure how they're how they're seeing it Picadilly I think is okay it has that same kind of Rhythm as as Mississippi right so one Mississippi two Picadilly three elephant Like Elephant does not work I I I don't think that works at all I me one elephant two elephant it's it's so clunky it's no good at all I have to veto that one but Picadilly Picadilly seems incredibly similar to Mississippi so I'm I'm perfectly happy with that as a as a difference but it's also the kind of thing that I've found people have family versions of that aren't used anywhere outside their extended family so it's there's there's room for lots of variation we want to hear what word you put in between numbers when you count to make sure there's a second spacing so put comments under the video Mississippi elephant padelli thousand something different we want to know people often ask me or or Express astonishment when they get American addresses that they need to send something to and the the address might be four or five digit long the the number before the street so you know to live at 2,787 Main Street or something like that whereas you know the last place I lived here was number seven and my mother always found that strange she often wrote it as 70 she just couldn't imagine that I really lived at a place that was only number seven in in the great scheme of things it's funny because I I never really tuned into the lwh house number thing I mean now that you have mentioned it it seems incredibly obvious and yes I can think of a bunch of addresses in my life here that that were low numbers and it's definitely the case well well at least it's the case in New York growing up that I don't think there was ever a house number that was less than 100 so I knew people who lived in 100 or one you know7 or 109 houses but I I don't think there was ever a single address that was below that number where I'm from you never have a a single digit you rarely have a twood digigit digit um street address so I my family is on the first block of Miller Street and the first number is 100 well it's it's about the grid Road system in America in in England you don't talk about blocks the same way you do in America because the roads are all higgledy piggley um and don't necessarily make nice squares but since American ones typically do make nice squares what you want in this system is to have the number all match within each block you talk about the 100 block of Miller Street once you cross the road that intersects with Miller Street and go on to the next block it'll be the 200 block so my block of of my street where I grew up goes up to 131 and then it starts over at 200 once you cross the road so your numbers get higher quicker yeah it is it is almost unbelievable to me that the numbers on one side of the street don't have anything to do with the numbers on the other side of the street and I still come across this and it's it's just appalling right that you're walking across the street and the numbers on one side are going you know 3 five 79 and you look across the other side of the street and the numbers will be 50 48 46 right they're they're even they're not aligned and they're going in the opposite direction and it's just maddening I don't understand how this came to be why anybody has let it stand for as long as it has it's it is just baffling to me and the the first few times that I ran across this that I didn't realize like you have to check the numbers on the other side of the street I got severely lost in London a couple of times trying to find places because I'm walking down very long streets in the completely opposite direction thinking oh I you know I'll just cross the street when I need those even numbers right and then you get to wherever you're supposed to be you cross the street and you're hundreds off from wherever you were actually trying to get but you're still on the same street it's like I said it it's just unbelievable to me I just it's like I refuse to believe that humans ever decided to do this right on purpose this isn't exactly number related but I I can tell you the the thing that I did notice that I find is just Charming is the habit of naming buildings houses right so even like a giant office building will sometimes have the name and it'll be like 70 Darwin house but this house suffix or this house label for like big corporate buildings or just Council Flats um I I find is is kind of remarkable and very Charming in and of itself and that strikes me as being very British right where someone could say you know oh oh I live at you know 50 fan house and right but 50 fan house is a gigantic Tower block right it's not like a little cottage like it sounds so I I I do quite like that I love to explore the city and just kind of wander around and and there's always a ton of construction going on and in particular in in the past few years and right now there's a bunch of big luxury buildings going up or that have been recently constructed and and I can't help but notice that all of them want to be number one at at whatever they are right so for example there's right one London Bridge and there's one black frers there's one Tower Bridge right and these are are luxury buildings and they always write it like really big on the sign right it'll say one black frers and the other thing that I can't help but notice is they always like to write out the one right it's O NE e it's never the number one I find that interesting I I assume that that that somewhere some Architecture Firm decided that this is a kind of luxury statement I'd be curious to know if this happens elsewhere in the world because you know as we discussed it I don't think that it can happen in New York because the buildings can't start at 1 right they have to start at 100 but I've noticed that some of these buildings that label themselves as one whatever they're in they're in like suspicious spots where I look around and I think I'm not sure that you can really claim that you are one Tower Bridge right there are numerous buildings here any of which looks like they could be number one Tower Bridge um so I I have my doubts about the accuracy of this number system although you know with the street numbers you know who knows right you know it's the numbers don't have anything to do with anything so they they could just be all over the [Music] place so a man walks into a bar he asks for 10 times more drinks than everyone else the bman says now that is an order of magnitude