Numbers, pronunciation of years

 

Q:

Mine is a question about the pronunciation of years such as 2020 or 2115. Would you mind letting me know?

Ary Malaver
arytiger@hotmail.com

A:

The usual way to refer to years is to pronounce the first two digits together as one number, and the second two together as another number. The year 2020 will be "twenty-twenty," and the year 2115 will be "twenty-one-fifteen."

There are other styles you might sometimes hear. Radio announcers, for example, like to add a certain style to their deliveries by pronouncing the numbers of time and date in flowery, almost poetic ways. Thus, you might hear: "Two-thousand and twenty," or "Two-oh-two-oh," and "Two-thousand-and-fifteen," "two-thousand-fifteen," or "two-thousand-one-hundred-and-fifteen." Business people would shorten the form to "twenty" and to "fifteen." The year 2001 is regularly pronounced as "two-thousand-one," or in a short form, "oh-one" (for '01).