About the Words to Number Converter
This tool parses numbers written in English words and returns the digits: "eight thousand eight hundred forty-one" becomes 8841. It understands the scale words (hundred, thousand, million, billion) and both the international and Indian scales (lakh, crore), plus "minus" or "negative" for negatives. Convert several at once with one phrase per line.
It is useful for turning dictated or written amounts back into numbers, and for cleaning up data where quantities were spelled out. Words it does not recognise are reported rather than guessed. To go the other way, the Number to Words tool spells numbers out.
Parsing follows the two rules English number words obey. Small words accumulate by addition, so forty and one give 41, while a scale word multiplies whatever has been collected before it, so three hundred is 3 times 100 and two million is 2 times 1000000. The running total is banked each time a scale word is reached, which is how two million three hundred thousand resolves to 2300000 rather than a muddle.
Punctuation is forgiving: the hyphen in forty-one splits like a space, the British and in one hundred and five is skipped, and case is ignored. What the parser will not do is guess. A typo such as thousend is reported by name rather than silently dropped, which is what you want when you are cleaning a column of dictated amounts and need to know exactly which row failed. To pull numerals out of a paragraph of prose instead, use Extract Numbers.
How to use
- Paste number phrases, one per line.
- Copy the digits.
- Unknown words are reported so you can fix the phrasing.
Common questions
- Does it handle "and", as in "one hundred and five"?
- Yes, "and" is ignored, so British-style phrasing works.
- Does it understand lakh and crore?
- Yes, the Indian scale words are supported alongside the international ones.
- What about decimals like "point five"?
- Decimal phrasing is not parsed; provide whole-number words. Use digits for the fractional part.