Documentation/documentation

Overview

numword deals with the number words in natural languages. You can enter a sequence of digits, and the program will write the number word as it is spelled in the desired language. Likewise, a number word can be entered and the program will write the corresponding number as a sequence of digits.

Furthermore, the module maps numbers to a few calendar-related sets of words in natural languages:

• 1..7 to weekday names (Monday ... Sunday) and their abbreviations
• 1..12 to month names (January ... December)
• 1..4 to words for seasons (spring, summer, autumn, winter)

Applications

• Fun for children
• eLearning
• Printing of the amount in words on checks
• Internationalized calendar
• Extraction of numbers and dates from long texts like the bible

Possible Future Extensions

• angle to compass direction (north, east ...)
• Ordinal numbers (second, third, fourth ...)
• Fractions (half, third, quarter ...)
• Multiples (twice, three times ...), or threefold
• Prefixes for positive (deca, hecto, kilo ...) and negative powers of 10 (dezi, centi, milli ...)
• Genealogical hierarchy
• More languages
• Braille output
• Declination of number words (especially ordinal numbers)
• Evangelists/Gospels
• Apostel/Disciples
• Bible books
• Astrological periods (Sagittarius, Cancer ...), link to churchcal
• Planets of the sun (Mercure = 1, Venus = 2, Earth = 3 ...)
• Euro countries
• Unicode characters
• RGB color values
• Nebulae (M-number) with their galactical positions
• International telephone prefix numbers and corresponding country names (49 = Germany)
• numerical country codes
• Towns by their postal codes
• ISBN book seller prefixes
• Hexadecimal, binary, octal converter
• Text -> SMS digits (multiple or T9)
• reference to Wikipedia article for the number, in specified language (done)
• show on Abacus

Problems

• For right-to-left languages (Arabic) the lists are not always displayed properly.
• Testing is rather difficult if you are not a native speaker of the language.
• Some languages declinate words for small numbers (1,2,3). The current implementation doesn't attempt to handle variations for gender, numerus and case properly, except for singular/plural of million, milliard, billion etc. Dual is also not yet supported.
• It is an interesting fact that the numbering schemes in most languages use powers of 1000, but there are exceptions where special words for (powers of) 10000 are used (Klingon, SinoSpeller).
• For the languages based on powers of 1000, a fixed set of Latin prefixes is used for numbers >= 1 million (c.f. BaseSpeller.wordN000). For some languages these prefixes must be modified (cyrillic character set, c -> k in German).
• Some languages still use different number word sets for living entities, cattle, money etc. There is currently no attempt to handle these variations.

See also the hints for developers.

Back to numword input form