Two thousand and nine or...twenty oh nine?
A question from Mr Sokhna in Senegal:
Is it possible to read the year 2009 saying twenty oh nine?
Amy Lightfoot answers
Click below to hear the answer:
Hello Mr Sokhna. Well my first reaction to your question was 'no', because I’ve only ever heard people say two thousand and nine, but the more I think about it, the more I think that maybe it doesn’t sound so strange and in the future we may well refer to this year as twenty oh nine. At the moment, however, I think it’s quite rare for people to say the year this way.
I think people did say nineteen hundred and one at the beginning of that century – certainly that’s a formal way that years are referred to from the twentieth and earlier centuries. I remember at my friend’s wedding the registrar read out the date as 'in this year nineteen hundred and ninety nine' instead of nineteen ninety nine. It did sound a bit odd at the time but it does sound more formal, don’t you think?
Anyway – back to your specific question. I think that the way we say the years in this century will change once we reach about 2010 and then I would expect that people would get in the habit of saying the years of the whole century that way and refer even to 2001 as twenty oh one. Thanks for asking such an interesting question. We’ll have to wait and see what happens!
About Amy Lightfoot
Amy Lightfoot started out doing a degree in psychology in 1995 and quickly became interested in the processes involved in learning languages. She now has a Trinity CertTESOL, DELTA and MA in English Language Teaching. She has taught English and worked on teacher training projects in the UK, Portugal, India, Afghanistan and Bhutan. She is currently working as a freelance materials writer and language trainer in Somerset, England.
