The big picture
Italian numbers are stitched into one continuous word, with two small rules that govern the seams: drop the final vowel before uno or otto, and add an accent when a compound ends in tré.
Zero to twenty
The teens collapse a little — diciassette, diciotto, diciannove all fuse dieci with the unit instead of writing them out separately.
The tens (20 – 90)
All seven end in -anta except venti. Memorize the first vowel of each — that's where the meaning lives.
Compound numbers — the seams
Glue the ten and the unit together without a space. Two rules govern the seam: drop the ten's final vowel before uno or otto, and write tré with an acute accent when it ends the word.
The hundreds
Completely regular — every hundred is just the digit fused with cento. And never say un cento; the standalone word is just cento.
In the wild
Thousands
The one quirk worth memorizing: mille is singular, but its plural is mila. So 2.000 is duemila, not duemille. (And like cento, never say un mille.)
Millions & billions
Italian uses the European long scale — and follows it with a tiny grammatical tax: when a number is followed by a noun, you bridge it with di.
Italian uses miliardo, the long-scale European form — same word as French milliard, German Milliarde.
English short-scale "billion" is the same number, but the false-friend cognate bilione would be 10¹² in Italian.
Things to remember
Five rules that will save you from the most common mistakes.
Reading is one thing.
Hearing it at speed is another.
The companion iOS app generates random numbers in your chosen range and reads them aloud in Italian. Five minutes a day.
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