French numbers, 0 to 1000

Why French counting breaks at 70

0 to 69 follows a pattern close enough to English that it barely needs explaining:vingt (20), trente (30),quarante (40)… each decade is its own word, and you bolt a unit onto it with a hyphen — vingt-deux (22), quarante-cinq (45).

Then 70 arrives and French counts by twenties instead of tens for the rest of the way. 70 is soixante-dix — literally "sixty-ten". 80 is quatre-vingts — "four twenties".90 is quatre-vingt-dix — "four twenties ten". So 72 is "sixty plus twelve" (soixante-douze) and 92 is "four twenties plus twelve" (quatre-vingt-douze). There is no shortcut here — this stretch has to be memorised, which is what the drill is for.

Three spelling rules are worth holding onto once the pattern above makes sense:

• 21, 31, 41, 51 and 61 use et instead of a hyphen — vingt et un, never vingt-un.
• 71 is the one exception in its decade: soixante et onze, not soixante-et-un-dix.
• quatre-vingts takes an "s" alone (80) but drops it the moment a number follows: quatre-vingt-un (81), quatre-vingt-deux (82) — and there is no "et" anywhere in the 80s or 90s.

The full list

All 110 numbers the drill uses, with the Gurmukhi respelling for each. Cover the French column and read down the digits if you would rather test yourself on paper.

Numbers past 1000 are read differently again — see the Years drill for how a year like 1996 is said. Word list last updated 2026-07-26.

Keep going

• Numbers, dates and time (full lesson)A1
• Practise saying yearsGame
• Practise telling timeGame
• Convert your TEF/TCF scores to CLBTool