How To Pronounce The Year Correctly: Twenty Ten

The people at "Twenty Not Two Thousand" are worried that because people said "two thousand and nine," this habit may carry over for the present year.

Don't let it happen! It's easily the most inefficient way to say the name of the year.

Say the year "1810" out loud. Now say the year "1999" out loud. See a pattern? It's been easier, faster, and shorter to say years this way for every decade (except for the one that just ended) instead of saying the number the long way. However, many people are carrying the way they said years from last decade over to this decade as a bad habit. If we don't fix this now, we'll be stuck saying years the long way for the next 89 years. Don't let that happen!

Link - via mentalfloss

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by nmiller.


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1000=ten hundred

1001=ten oh one

1002=ten oh two

1010=ten ten

1066=ten sixty-six (Battle of Hastings)

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.

1492=fourteen ninety-two (the genocide of the indigenous peoples of North and South America begins)

.

.

1700=seventeen hundred

1701=seventeen oh one

1776=seventeen seventy-six (Declaration of Independence)

.

.

1800=eighteen hundred

1801=eighteen oh one

1898=eighteen ninety eight (Spanish-American War)

.

.

1900=nineteen hundred

1901=nineteen oh one (In poesy, nineteen aught and one)

1910=nineteen ten

1929=nineteen twenty-nine (stock market crash and start of the Great Depression)

1942=nineteen forty-two (Pearl Harbor attacked)

1943=nineteen forty-three (the year of my nativity)

1999=nineteen ninety-nine (the last four-digit year in the Gregorian calendar that started with the numeral one)

2000=tweny hundred (Do YOU pronounce the letter “t” in the word “twenty” when used in a compound number like 25? Tweny-five.)

2001=tweny oh one (What does Hollywood know? Two thousand and one: A Space Odyssey. Bah humbug!)

2002=tweny oh two

2003=tweny oh three

2004=tweny oh four

2005=tweny oh five

2006=tweny oh six

2007=tweny oh seven

2008=tweny oh eight

2009=tweny oh nine

2010=tweny ten (the year Jesus Christ celebrates the two thousand tenth anniversary of his nativity)

2012=tweny twelve (last year in the Mayan long-count calendar)

2036=tweny thirty-six (Soc Sec pays out more than it takes in and starts to go broke)

'Nuf said.
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Last decade, I usually said, 'two thousand something' or 'two thousand and something' to refer to a year. Now, whenever I refer to any of the years of the last decade, I somehow got lazy, and just call it by its last two digits (i.e., 'oh-four' for 2004).

For the coming years, though, I've been calling them 'twenty-something'. I don't know, it just sounds better. I tried calling them 'two-thousand-something' or even just by their last two digits, but it didn't sound as natural for some reasons (IMO). I bet you though that by 2060s or 2070s, people will forget that we have this conversation at all, and call years in the 21st century only by their last 2 digits.
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