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Home » Hundred, Thousand, Million vs Hundreds, Thousands, Millions

Hundred, Thousand, Million vs Hundreds, Thousands, Millions

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Numerals like dozen, hundred, thousand, million and such like are sometimes used in singular, sometimes in plural. So, we have hundred vs hundreds, thousand vs thousands, and so on.

So, when do we use them in singular and when do we use them in plural?

We use them in singular when they make part of a concrete number:

dozen

two dozen eggs = 24 eggs

five hundred people = 500 people

twenty thousand birds = 20,000 birds

ten million dollars = $10,000,000

We also use them in singular if the number isn’t very precise:

several hundred people

We use them in plural if they just mean ‘a lot’:

dozens and dozens of people = very many people

they arrived first by/in the dozens, then by/in the hundreds = they arrived in large groups

thousands of cows = more than 2000 cows

thousands of times = many times

he could have saved millions of lives = over 2,000,000 lives

it’s worth billions = more than 2,000,000,000 dollars/euros/etc.

hundreds of billions of stars = more than 200,000,000,000 stars

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