Convert Number Words to Digits

Turn spelled-out numbers into digits

Paste anything that contains numbers written in English words — a sentence, a transcript, a column of phrases from a spreadsheet — and get the digits back. The default mode rewrites the text in place and leaves every other word alone, so a paragraph stays a paragraph. Everything runs in your browser; the text you paste is never uploaded.

Worked example

Using the Numbers in prose preset:

• Text or number words: We shipped twenty-five units and one hundred and two spares.
• What to return: replace
• Thousands separator: none
• Ordinal words: cardinal

The result is:

We shipped 25 units and 102 spares.

Switch What to return to value, paste one million two hundred fifty thousand, and pick the comma separator to get 1,250,000 instead.

What the controls mean

What to return picks the shape of the output. replace (default) rewrites numbers where they appear and keeps the surrounding prose. value treats every non-empty line as one complete number phrase and reports an error naming the first word that does not belong — useful for cleaning a column of data. extract throws the prose away and returns just the numbers, one per line.

Thousands separator only affects how digits are rendered: none keeps the output machine-readable, while comma, space and underscore group by threes.

Billion / trillion reading switches between the short scale (a billion is 10⁹) and the long scale used in much of continental Europe (a billion is 10¹², a trillion 10¹⁸). milliard is always 10⁹ in both, and the Indian lakh (100,000) and crore (10,000,000) are always accepted.

Ordinal words decides what twenty-first becomes: 21, 21st, or nothing at all. Read half and quarter as fractions turns one and a half into 1.5; turn it off when those words are ordinary English in your text. Read digit runs is off by default because it changes meaning: with it on, one two three becomes 123 rather than 1 2 3.

What it understands

Units, teens and tens (seven, nineteen, forty), hyphenated compounds (twenty-five), hundred and scale words up to decillion, the connector and only where English really uses it (one hundred and forty-two, but one and two stays two numbers), decimal words (five point forty-seven → 5.47, one point five million → 1500000), fraction words (three quarters → 0.75, half a million → 500000), and negatives (minus one hundred, negative twenty one).

Limits and edge cases

• Input is capped at 200,000 characters; longer text is rejected with a clear message.
• Arithmetic is exact 128-bit decimal, so values must fit in roughly ±1.7 × 10³⁸. one decillion (10³³) works; a long-scale one septillion (10⁴²) reports "number is too large" rather than losing precision to floating point.
• Only half and quarter are treated as fractions — third, fifth and eighth are also ordinal words, and thirds have no exact decimal form.
• English only. Roman numerals, currency phrases such as one dollar and fifty cents, and multiplicative phrases such as six sixes are not parsed.
• value mode is deliberately strict: a stray word on a line is an error, not a silent skip. Use extract or replace for messy text.

FAQ