🌐 Precision Linguist 🇫🇷⇄🇬🇧

[buoyant isle]

Please be patient

Our volunteers look into many questions every day; sometimes it takes them a little while to answer.

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[rare vine]

@narrow karma But 20 multiplied by 200 is quatre mille (4 000) ...
If you want 220, it's deux cent vingt.

[narrow karma]

wait…

💀

so it only happens to “quatre-vingts” then

cuz that’s the only instance where “vingt” is multiplied by a number

[green wind]

Deux cent vingt

[grizzled moss]

Yeah and only when the number ends with quatre-vingts
☑️ cent-quatre-vingts
☑️ cent-quatre-vingt-dix

If you read up on old books, you may come across other numbers following that pattern like trois vingts for 60 or six vingts for 120.

[junior verge]

Yup
Doesn't really matter anyway, because we hardly ever spell them out

[grizzled moss]

There is an area in Paris known as le quartier des Quinze-Vingts named after what was then an hospice that could house 300 (15×20) patients.

But anything besides quatre-vingts is fully archaic by now

[worthy gull]

Average spelling rule in french