Italian Numbers 1-100 (and Beyond): The Complete Chart

Italian numbers 1-20: the complete chart

Italian numbers are one of the friendliest counting systems in Europe. Nothing runs longer than four syllables, spelling matches sound almost perfectly, and there's none of the arithmetic that makes French numbers a puzzle. Here are the first twenty; capital letters mark the stressed syllable.

Only eleven are genuinely new: zero through dieci. Everything from 11 to 19 fuses those same words with dieci, and everything past 20 recombines them. Wiktionary's Italian numerals appendix has the raw list if you want to check yourself.

Why 17, 18, and 19 flip the order

Read 11 to 19 again and you'll find a hinge. From 11 to 16, Italian puts the unit first and dieci second: undici is one-ten, sedici is six-ten. At 17 the order reverses and dieci moves to the front: diciassette is ten-seven, diciotto is ten-eight, diciannove is ten-nine.

Two spellings deserve a slow look. Diciassette carries a double s and diciannove a double n, and those letters have a history: the words come from Latin decem ac septem and decem ac novem, and the little word ac left its consonant behind when each phrase collapsed. Write diciasette and an Italian reader spots it.

Number 18 loses a letter instead of gaining one: dieci plus otto gives diciotto, not "diciaotto." That's a preview of the next section.

Italian numbers 20-100 and the elision rule

Past twenty, counting is pure assembly: take the tens word, glue the unit on the end, write it as one word. Venti plus due gives ventidue (22), trenta plus sette gives trentasette (37). Eight more words unlock everything up to 99.

The elision rule: ventuno, never "ventiuno"

This is the rule that separates learners who sound Italian from learners who don't.

When a tens word meets uno or otto, it drops its own final vowel. Both units begin with a vowel, and Italian refuses to let two vowels collide inside a number. So 21 is ventuno, not "ventiuno." 28 is ventotto, 41 is quarantuno, 48 is quarantotto. It happens at every ten, every time.

Sixteen numbers, one rule. No other unit triggers it, because uno and otto are the only vowel-initial ones. Treccani's entry for ventuno records the form this way.

The accent on tré

The second rule is smaller and easier to forget. Standing alone, tre takes no accent. Put it at the end of a compound and it gains an acute one: ventitré (23), trentatré (33), quarantatré (43), on through novantatré (93).

That accent does real work: it marks the stress, which lands on the final syllable, ven-tee-TREH. The Accademia della Crusca specifies the acute é, the closed e of perché, rather than the grave è. You'll see ventitrè in print and on menus. It's a common slip, not the standard.

Learn those two rules and every number under 100 comes out right first time.

How do you pronounce Italian numbers?

Three habits cover almost all of it.

Soft c and the -dici ending

Italian c is hard ("k") before a, o, and u, and soft ("ch" as in cheese) before e and i. Cinque is "CHEEN-kweh," not "SINK-way," and cento is "CHEN-toh." The whole 11-to-16 family ends in -dici, said "-dee-chee." Say "-dee-see" and you've drifted into Spanish numbers by accident. Quattro keeps its hard k, because there the c sits before a u.

Double consonants are real

English speakers skate over double letters. Italian holds them, and elsewhere that length changes meaning, so numbers are a safe place to build the habit. Sit on the t in sette, otto, quattro, settanta, ottanta, and on the s in sessanta. Then notice where doubling stops: nove and novanta take a single v and n, as do venti, trenta, and quaranta.

Where the stress falls

This is where most number charts go quiet or go wrong. Two patterns handle nearly everything.

The teens are front-heavy. In 11 through 16 the stress lands just before -dici: OON-dee-chee, DOH-dee-chee, TREH-dee-chee, KWEEN-dee-chee, SEH-dee-chee. The exception is quattordici, a syllable longer, so the beat sits in the middle: kwaht-TOR-dee-chee. From 17 the shape changes again: dee-chahs-SET-teh, dee-CHOT-toh, dee-chahn-NOH-veh.

Compounds stress their last piece. In ventidue or quarantadue the main stress goes on the closing unit, where it would fall in that unit alone: ven-tee-DOO-eh, kwah-rahn-tah-DOO-eh. The tens word keeps a lighter secondary beat, so you may hear a faint pulse on -ran-, but it isn't the main stress.

The elided forms follow the same rule, and this is the one learners get backwards. Ventuno is ven-TOO-noh, stressed on the u, and ventotto is ven-TOT-toh. Plenty of charts print "VEN-tuno"; Wiktionary and the Italian pronunciation dictionaries both put the stress on that second syllable.

Italian numbers past 100: cento, mille, and mila

Cento is 100, and it stands on its own. Italian never puts a word for "one" in front of it, so "uncento" doesn't exist. The hundreds above it stack the unit on the front, with no irregular forms anywhere in the set.

One thing cento doesn't do is elide. Where the tens drop a vowel, cento keeps its o: 101 is centouno, 108 is centootto. (A shortened centuno exists but stays rare.)

Mille becomes mila

1,000 is mille, and its plural is mila, so 2,000 is duemila, not "duemille." That swap catches every beginner once.

Milione and miliardo behave nothing like mille. They're nouns: they take un, pluralize into due milioni and due miliardi, and need di before whatever they count. A million people is un milione di persone.

One habit surprises everyone: Italian writes long numbers as a single unbroken word. 654.321 is seicentocinquantaquattromilatrecentoventuno. Every rule from this page sits inside it, elision included, right at the end in -ventuno.

Italian ordinal numbers: primo, secondo, and the -esimo pattern

Ordinals answer "which one." The first ten come straight from Latin as their own words, and they work like adjectives, agreeing in gender and number: primo, prima, primi, prime.

From eleventh upward, one suffix does all the work. Drop the cardinal's final vowel and add -esimo, stressing that -e-: undici gives undicesimo (oon-dee-CHEH-zee-moh), then ventesimo, ventunesimo, centesimo, millesimo.

Two endings resist the vowel-dropping: -tré keeps its vowel and sheds the accent (ventitré gives ventitreesimo), and -sei keeps its own (ventisei gives ventiseiesimo).

Roman numerals

Italian still writes centuries, popes, and monarchs in Roman numerals, and reads them aloud as ordinals. Il XIX secolo is spoken il diciannovesimo secolo, the 19th century. Luigi XIV is Luigi quattordicesimo, never "Luigi quattordici."

Using Italian numbers: prices, age, dates, and phone numbers

Charts are worth nothing until you spend them.

Prices

Ask quanto costa? (how much does it cost?) and the answer comes back as a number plus euro, a word that never changes shape: due euro, venti euro, cento euro. You'll hear euri in casual speech, but invariable euro is the standard.

Written figures work the opposite way from English: Italian uses a comma for decimals and a period for thousands, so 1.250,50 € is one thousand two hundred fifty euros and fifty cents. Read a decimal aloud with virgola, so 5,3 is cinque virgola tre.

Age

Italian doesn't say you are a number of years. It says you have them. Quanti anni hai? means "how many years do you have?", and you answer with ho plus the number plus anni.

Because anni starts with a vowel, the tens elide again, now with an apostrophe: ho vent'anni (I'm 20), ho trent'anni (30), ho quarant'anni (40).

At 21, 31, and 41 something different happens. Those shorten to ventun, trentun, quarantun, and take no apostrophe: ho ventun anni. Dropping a vowel before another vowel is elision, which gets an apostrophe; chopping a word short is truncation, which doesn't. Quick test: ventun also works before a consonant (ventun libri), so it can't be an elision.

Dates

Italian dates run on plain cardinals, with one exception. The first of the month takes the ordinal il primo: il primo maggio, 1 May. Every other day is a cardinal: il due maggio, il ventitré maggio.

Phone numbers

Read them digit by digit and you're always understood. Note that 0 is zero, with no shortcut like the English "oh": 06 45 67 89 is zero sei, quattro cinque, sei sette, otto nove.

Say your age and today's date out loud right now, in Italian. That's two real sentences built entirely from this page. The Italian hub has the next lesson, and the easiest languages to learn puts Italian in context.