Year on Invitations?

I wrote two thousand thirteen on mine

We did two thousand and thirteen on ours.

This was intriguing me so I looked it up and got out my grammar books.

It is actually quite interesting

saying the 'and' (or the 'n' which is what it comes out as) would be classed as natural English. All the people I know would naturally say hundred and one etc not hundred one.

In maths I was never taught that and 'and' is the decimal point it would be one hundred and four point two four for example (or three point one if we said 'and' we would be saying three and one which would be four)

Looking on the internet there is a big split. Some people saying it is a american/British things but the same amount saying it isn't.

I would explain it that as numbers we get bigger we group them together, one hundred, two hundred etc and we add the tens and single units to this.

My grammar books tells me to use the 'and' as does some grammar sites on the net but then the next one says no. I guess we will have to agree to disagree (but I still maintain 'and' is correct and will still teach it)

The "and" meaning the decimal point comes from the proper written form of numbers (as in standard, expanded and written form).

To use your example of 3.1

I think most people read that as "three point one." I agree with you on that. However the way a number is commonly read, and the proper way of writing it out is different. The proper "written form" of 3.1 is "three and one tenth." Hence, where the "and" comes into play when we talk about decimals. 213.64 would be "two hundred thirteen and sixty-four hundredths." 2013.7 would be "two thousand thirteen and seven tenths." Therefore just 2013 would be "two thousand thirteen."

Ned, I have also seen a few sites say that this is a common difference between American and British.

I was a math major in college though, and the above way is the correct way to write out numbers. However I agree that we will probably have to agree to disagree.

Two thousand thirteen is correct in English grammar too. I have an English degree. The "and" is simply incorrect. Though I'm sure you can find numerous websites to say it was ok if you used the and.

Thanks for such great information. Very interesting indeed.

Isn't "hundred" an exception though? As in you would use "and" after "hundred" but not after any other number, at least in the spoken version. So:

101: One hundred and one

2013: Two thousand thirteen

2504: Two thousand five hundred AND four. It seems to me you wouldn't say: two thousand five hundred four.

Yes, no?

Mrs S, nope, hundred is not an exception. Now like I kinda touched upon in my last post, how people commonly read numbers tends to be different than the proper way to write them.

Even in the above cases, the correct way to write out 101 in it's written form is "one hundred one," and 2504 would be "two thousand five hundred four."

True MrsO. I learn something here every day :-) I guess I see the year written in places like wedding invitations, but I never see a number like 2504 written out. But that's an unfortunate consequence of my life being tied into APA :-(

I put two thousand thirteen. No and.

Yea, it isn't very common to have large numbers written out. Even for actual writing, there are so many rules about where and when you should use the numeral version or the word when dealing with numbers. I admit that I don't know much about that when it comes to those rules, but I do know about the correct way to write the written/word form of numbers

On our invitations we did two thousand and thirteen

Two thousand and thirteen