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Comment by sjrd | Hacker News Reader

In French, and more specifically French as spoken in some areas in Switzerland, there is a very natural way of pronouncing hex numbers:

1 to F are the normal 'un' to 'quinze'. A is 'dix'.

10 is 'seize'. 11 is 'seize et un' etc. Until 1F which is `seize et quinze'.

20 to 2F are 'vingt' until 'vingt et quinze'.

Etc.

70, 80 and 90 are called 'septante', 'huitante' (Swiss-specific) and 'nonante'.

A0 is 'dixante', then we have 'onzante', 'douzante', 'treizante', 'quatorzante' and 'quinzante'.

100 is 'cent', and from there normal rules apply.

Etc.

So B78D would be 'onze mille sept cents huitante treize'.

Note that 'soixante dix' is 6A, not 70.

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I see no reason this couldn't be applied to English. "-nz(e)", etc. is akin to "-teen", and beyond that it should be exactly the same, with septante/seventy, huitante/eighty, and nonante/ninety being the popular English versions (unlike e.g. Metropolitan French).

B78D: Eleven Thousand Seven Hundred and Eighty Thirteen

See also Tolkien's famous hobbit's birthday party.

I love this system, but how do you deal with the ambiguity around "ten"?

    9: nine
    A: ten?
    B: eleven
    ...
    10: ten?
    20: twenty
    30: thirty

A=ten, 10=onety, 11=onety-one, 1A=onety-ten, etc ?

Edit: Or as suggested in the original link, A=Ten, 10=annty, 11=annty-one and 1A=annty-ten

    9: nine
    A: ten
    B: eleven
    ...
    10: hexTen
    20: hexTwenty
    30: hexThirty
    ...
    100: hexHundred

My issue is that 1000 is hexThousand, but when working with hex numbers, its far more logical to group them in 4s.

0x10000 is a number more deserving of a name than 0x1000.

In effect, I want to call 0x10000 as "hex-thousand" (correlating to the number where 16-bits overflow). And 0x100000000 as "hex-million" (correlating to the 32-bit overflow number).

Of course, that leaves 0x1000 and 0x1000000 as ambiguous.

I guess the language you're looking for is Japanese, then. (Or Chinese?)

1=一 ichi

10=十 juu

100=百 hyaku

1000=千 sen

1,0000=万 man

10,0000=十万 juuman

100,0000=百万 hyakuman

1000,0000=千万 senman

1,0000,0000=億 oku

1,0000,0000,0000=兆 chou

1,0000,0000,0000,0000=京 kei

‘Myriad’, via Greek¹. (Apparently though, ‘myria‐’ was a pre-SI metric prefix for ×10000⏨, so I'm afraid someone will come along and insist on ‘myribi‐’, and I'll have to smack them.)

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10,000#Name

Interesting.

Myriad shares similarities to "Million". So maybe Myriad / Biriad / Trilliad / Quadrilliad will scale into the higher orders.

Hmm, maybe I'll make this a thing.

Not to be confused with the long-scale numbers: milliard/billiard/trilliard

Following the French style:

10 is sixteen.

11 is sixteen one

A is not ten in hexadecimal.

"ten" always means 10 in any base. the number after "nine" is "deci".

Pronounce 11,78D vs B78D.

As suggested in a cousin: onety-one thousand, seven hundred and eighty thirteen.

Every word (phrase in the case of hundred/thousand) becomes strictly one digit, as opposed to normal English where e.g. "thirteen" is actually two digits.

But onety-one thousand isn’t strictly one digit, is it?

From the grandparent:

11 78D seize-un mille sept cent octante-quatrorze.

Or, in English:

11,78D Sixteen-one thousand seven hundred eighty fourteen.

Sixteen-one thousand, seven hundred and eighty fourteen

As, from the original french comment:

1A = dix / ten

10 = seize / sixteen

11 = seize-et-un / sixteen-one

Others have suggested 10 = onety instead of sixteen. This would be more consistent, but less idiomatic (onety is not a number in English, and hex is base sixteen).

Let's note that this fall apart in Metropolitan French, where we don't say neither « septante » for 70, nor « nonante » for 90 (and even less « huitante » for 80), but « soixante-dix » for 70, « quatre-vingt » for 80 and « quatre-vingt-dix » for 90.

It's quite a shame, because that solution for reading hexadecimal numbers out loud is quite elegant :)

Belgian French uses septante/nonante. Huitante would be a great addition.

I personally prefer octante. Septante and huitante sounds to much like just slapping -tante to 7 and 8. And just to be coherent, I would love to have heptante for 70.

"septante", "octante", "nonante" would be coherently based on Latin etymons, but if you want to coherently use "heptante", which relies on a Greek etymon, you should probably also use "ennéante" in lieu of "nonante".

In the context of hex numbers "quatre-vingt" isn't a problem tho, no ambiguity.

For the folks who know zero French:

« soixante-dix » for 70 = sixty-ten

« quatre-vingt » for 80 = four-twenty

« quatre-vingt-dix » for 90 = four-twenty-ten

> Note that 'soixante dix' is 6A, not 70.

"Soixante-dix" would be 70 no matter how you look at it, and 0x6A is obviously "cent six".

That's why you need a new suffix as well as new names for exponentials instead of trying to retrofit existing number-naming convention. (Same thing is true for English as well)

So let this new hexadecimal suffix would be -anze, 16 ^ 3 is hexmille, 16 ^ 2 is hexcents,

0xB78D = 46989 would be "onze hexmille sept hexcents huitanze treize." or "quarante six mille neuf cents quatre-vingt neuf"

I think you’re missing the point. Soixante-dix becomes 6A, since 6x is « soixante » and A is « dix » Then, 7x becomes septante. For example, 7A becomes septante-dix

Sure, except that in standard (metropolitan) French, "soixante-dix" is already used for 70.

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