Thai numbers and prices

Thailand writes numbers with two sets of digits, and you will meet both in the same week. One set is the Arabic digits you already use: 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9. The other is the Thai set, ๐ ๑ ๒ ๓ ๔ ๕ ๖ ๗ ๘ ๙, called เลขไทย (lêek-thai). This is not a second number system. It is the same base-ten counting in different shapes, so ๕ is five in exactly the way 5 is five, and ๒๕ is twenty-five. In daily life the Arabic digits do nearly all the work. Price tags, receipts, bank statements, bus numbers, mobile numbers, road signs and the till display at the shop are all Arabic. Thai numerals survive in a narrower set of places: on banknotes, which print the value in both sets; on government forms and official paperwork, most often in the date; on temple signage; and on commemorative plaques and older buildings. That is why you need to recognise the ten shapes but will almost never write them. Reading is the whole job, and it takes an afternoon. Dates are where Thai numerals catch residents out. Thai official documents use the Buddhist Era, which runs 543 years ahead of the Western year, so 2026 is 2569 and may appear on the page as ๒๕๖๙. A rental contract, a hospital record or a receipt from a government office can carry that year in Thai numerals with no Western date anywhere on it. Nothing has been mistyped. Subtract 543 and you have your year. Counting one to ten is the part to own first: หนึ่ง (nèung), สอง (sǎwng), สาม (sǎam), สี่ (sìi), ห้า (hâa), หก (hòk), เจ็ด (jèt), แปด (bpàet), เก้า (gâo), สิบ (sìp). Zero is ศูนย์ (sǔun). Say them with the tones marked rather than flat. These are one-syllable words with no grammar around them to help a listener guess, which is why a flat number said in traffic noise so often gets the wrong thing handed to you. Twelve to nineteen are built by putting the unit after สิบ, and eleven has its own form, which comes below: สิบสอง (sìp-sǎwng) is twelve, สิบห้า (sìp-hâa) fifteen, สิบเก้า (sìp-gâo) nineteen. The tens are built the other way round, unit first: สามสิบ (sǎam-sìp) thirty, สี่สิบ (sìi-sìp) forty, เก้าสิบ (gâo-sìp) ninety. The order of the two words is the whole difference between thirteen and thirty, สิบสาม (sìp-sǎam) against สามสิบ (sǎam-sìp), so it is worth saying that pair aloud until it stops needing thought. Twenty is the one ten that is not built this way, and it also comes below. Above ninety-nine the words are ร้อย (ráwy) for a hundred, พัน (phan) for a thousand, หมื่น (mèun) for ten thousand, แสน (sǎen) for a hundred thousand and ล้าน (láan) for a million. The two with no English equivalent, หมื่น and แสน, are the ones that slow you down, because English groups everything above a thousand in thousands. The number 25,000 is สองหมื่นห้าพัน (sǎwng-mèun hâa-phan), two ten-thousands and five thousands, not twenty-five thousand. Rent, deposits, salaries, hospital bills and second-hand motorbikes are all quoted in numbers of this size, so rebuild the habit rather than converting each time. Now the first irregularity. หนึ่ง is one, but it is replaced by เอ็ด (èt) whenever that one sits at the end of a larger number. Eleven is สิบเอ็ด (sìp-èt), never สิบหนึ่ง. Twenty-one is ยี่สิบเอ็ด (yîi-sìp-èt), thirty-one สามสิบเอ็ด (sǎam-sìp-èt), a hundred and one ร้อยเอ็ด (ráwy-èt), which is also how the province name Roi Et is written. เอ็ด never stands alone. You cannot answer "how many?" with it and you cannot count a single object with it. Foreigners keep getting this wrong for a reason worth naming. You learn numbers as arithmetic, ten plus one, and Thai does not treat the final one as arithmetic. Worse, the error shows up in only one number out of every ten, so you can count to a hundred and be wrong nine times without hearing a pattern in it. And a Thai listener understands สิบหนึ่ง perfectly well, so nobody stops you, and nothing corrects a mistake that is never expensive. Drill the ones as their own set, out of sequence: 11, 21, 31, 41, 101, 1,001. Counting upwards will not fix it, because counting upwards is what built it. The second irregularity is twenty: ยี่สิบ (yîi-sìp), not สองสิบ. ยี่ is an older word for two, and among numbers it survives only here. You will still meet it outside the number system in fixed names: เดือนยี่ is the second lunar month, and the Northern festival ยี่เป็ง (yîi-bpeng) takes its name from the same word. In numbers, though, ยี่ belongs to twenty and to no other number: two hundred is สองร้อย (sǎwng-ráwy), two thousand is สองพัน (sǎwng-phan), and twenty-two is ยี่สิบสอง (yîi-sìp-sǎwng), with ยี่ in the tens and สอง back in the units. The rest of the tens are perfectly regular, and that regularity is what produces the mistake: you learn สามสิบ, สี่สิบ, ห้าสิบ, then run the pattern backwards over a gap the pattern does not cover. In the North and in Isaan you will also hear ซาว (saao) for twenty in local speech. ยี่สิบ is understood everywhere and is what you should say. Phone numbers are not quantities and are not said as quantities. You read them digit by digit, including the leading zero, which is ศูนย์ (sǔun). A number written 081-234-5678 is read sǔun bpàet nèung, sǎwng sǎam sìi, hâa hòk jèt bpàet. The one in a phone number is หนึ่ง and never เอ็ด, because a digit string has no units place and เอ็ด belongs to quantities. Reading a number out, Thai does not group repeated digits the way English says "double five": you say the digit twice, hâa hâa. When someone is dictating carefully you will also hear the count attached instead, ห้าสองตัว (hâa sǎwng dtua), two fives. Length is what tells you the number has ended: mobiles are ten digits, starting 06, 08 or 09, grouped 3-3-4; Bangkok landlines are nine digits, starting 02, grouped 2-3-4. Numbers rarely stand next to a noun on their own. Thai counts things with a classifier, and the usual order is noun, number, classifier: น้ำสองขวด (náam sǎwng khùat) is two bottles of water. When the number is one, spoken Thai normally flips the last two words: น้ำขวดหนึ่ง (náam khùat nèung), a bottle of water. Once the thing is obvious, because you are holding it up, the noun drops out and สองขวด is a complete order. Which classifier belongs to which noun is a separate job, and it is on the Thai classifiers page. Prices in a market come out shorter and faster than any textbook version. The full form of 250 baht is สองร้อยห้าสิบบาท (sǎwng-ráwy hâa-sìp bàat). What you will actually hear is สองร้อยห้า (sǎwng-ráwy hâa). Two things have gone. บาท drops, because you are both looking at the mangoes and there is nothing else the number could be. And สิบ drops too: a single digit spoken after ร้อย or พัน is the next place down, not the units. So ร้อยห้า is 150, สองร้อยห้า is 250, พันห้า is 1,500 and สองพันสาม is 2,300. Miss that rule and you will hear 250 as 205, which is the misunderstanding this shortening produces most often. The one in front of a unit shortens as well. หนึ่งร้อย is usually just ร้อย. Separately from that, the postposed pattern you saw in ขวดหนึ่ง applies to money, with หนึ่ง reduced to นึง: ร้อยนึง (ráwy neung) is one hundred, พันนึง (phan neung) one thousand. In that pattern the word sits after the unit and never in front of it. Note the trap it sets: ร้อยนึง is 100, but ร้อยเอ็ด is 101. Units shorten the same way. กิโล (gì-loo) becomes โล (loo), and fresh markets still price small quantities of meat, chillies and herbs by the ขีด (khìit), which is 100 grams. The answer to a price question usually names the unit before the figure, joined by ละ (lá), which means "per": โลละหกสิบ (loo-lá hòk-sìp) is sixty a kilo, อันละยี่สิบ (an-lá yîi-sìp) twenty each. Things are priced per kilo, per piece, per bunch, not per pointed-at object, so ละ is the seam inside what otherwise sounds like one long word. Learn to hear it and the price splits in two by itself. When a number goes past you, the question to have ready is อันนี้เท่าไหร่ครับ (an-níi thâo-rài khráp) if you are a man, and อันนี้เท่าไหร่คะ (an-níi thâo-rài khá) if you are a woman. The particle is the high-toned คะ here, not ค่ะ, because it is a question. Do not drop it. The bare question is not rude in its content, but it lands blunt from an adult stranger, and its absence is more noticeable to a vendor than any tone you get wrong. For loose produce sold by weight, ask โลละเท่าไหร่ครับ (loo-lá thâo-rài khráp) or โลละเท่าไหร่คะ (loo-lá thâo-rài khá), which gets you a price you can act on rather than a figure for one handful. Then say the number back before you pay, because a vendor will correct a wrong repetition instantly and will not correct a silent misunderstanding. If it still does not land, ask for it on a calculator or a phone screen. Most stalls have one within reach, and holding up a number is ordinary market behaviour, not a failure. The phrases that go around a price, asking, refusing, settling, are on market and bargaining, and the numbers themselves are worth saying out loud rather than reading, which is what numbers and prices practice is for.