Danish numbers 1–100 explained (with audio and a number machine)
Danish numbers are famous for one thing: 50 is halvtreds, 70 is halvfjerds, and nobody can explain why in under a minute. This guide does it in two, and then shows you the part that actually matters: how to hear a price at the bakery. Tap any number to hear it. Start with the machine just below: it turns any number into Danish.
Try any number
Type a number, read it, hear it. The explanation under it shows the ones-first rule and where the tens word comes from.
0 to 20
These you learn as words, like in any language. Notice that 1 is en or et, depending on the gender of the noun (en kaffe, et hus), and that 11 to 19 are their own words, not “ten-one”.
Pronunciation notes: fire is one syllable with a soft ending, syv ends in a “w”, seksten is “sais-ten”, and tyve is “tü-ve”, not “tie-ve”. See the pronunciation guide for the vowels.
The tens: where it gets strange
| Number | Danish | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|
| 20 | tyve | an old word for twenty; also “two tens” |
| 30 | tredive | three tens |
| 40 | fyrre | four tens (from fyrretyve) |
| 50 | halvtreds | 2½ × 20: “half of the third twenty” |
| 60 | tres | 3 × 20 |
| 70 | halvfjerds | 3½ × 20: “half of the fourth twenty” |
| 80 | firs | 4 × 20 |
| 90 | halvfems | 4½ × 20: “half of the fifth twenty” |
| 100 | hundrede | a hundred, at last |
The two-minute explanation of halvtreds
From 50 up, Danish counts in twenties, not tens. Sixty is tre-sinds-tyve, “three times twenty”, shortened to tres. Eighty is fir-sinds-tyve, four times twenty, firs. That part is just French: quatre-vingts.
The odd ones are 50, 70 and 90, and they use an old Danish way of saying “and a half”. Halvtredje meant “half of the third”, that is, two and a half, the way “half past two” means the third hour is half done. So halvtredje-sinds-tyve is two-and-a-half times twenty, 50. Shortened over the centuries: halvtreds. In the same way halvfjerde, three and a half, gives halvfjerds, 70, and halvfemte, four and a half, gives halvfems, 90.
The same “half of the next one” logic survives in the clock: halv tre means 2:30, half of the way to three, not half past three. English speakers get this wrong for years, and it makes them late.
Here is the honest advice: do not calculate. Danes do not think “two and a half times twenty” when they say fifty, any more than you think “four times twenty” when you say eighty. Learn the five words halvtreds, tres, halvfjerds, firs, halvfems as words, and the logic becomes a nice story to tell at parties.
The ones come first
Above 20, Danish says the ones before the tens, joined by og (and), all written as one word, exactly like German: 21 is enogtyve, “one-and-twenty”.
This is the rule that catches you at the till. Det bliver syvogfyrre kroner: you hear syv, you think “seven-something”, and by the time you have found the tens, the cashier has moved on. The fix is listening practice: the number machine at the top of this page, and every price you hear this week.
Hundreds, thousands and how they are written
- 100 is hundrede or et hundrede; 200 is to hundrede. Between the hundreds and the rest comes og: 105 is hundrede og fem, 250 is to hundrede og halvtreds.
- 1,000 is tusind; 1,500 is et tusind fem hundrede, and in prices often femten hundrede, “fifteen hundred”.
- A million is en million; a billion (a thousand million) is en milliard. The Danish billion is a million million, so be careful with English news.
- Written numbers swap the dot and the comma. Danish writes 1.500 kr. for fifteen hundred kroner, and 2,5 for two and a half. A Danish price tag that says 10.000 is ten thousand, not ten.
Numbers in everyday life
Prices
Prices are said as a number plus kroner, or just the number. Øre have all but disappeared, so 47,50 is syvogfyrre femti in a shop, using the Swedish-sounding femti for the fifty øre, a small exception everybody uses.
- Det bliver otteogtredive kroner.That will be 38 kroner.
- En kaffe koster femogfyrre kroner.A coffee costs 45 kroner.
Phone numbers
Danish phone numbers have eight digits and are said in four pairs, which means you need the numbers up to 99 to give your own number: 12 34 56 78 is tolv fireogtredive seksoghalvtreds otteoghalvfjerds. Practise your own number until it is automatic; you will say it at every reception desk in the country.
The time
Whole hours are klokken plus the number: klokken tre. Half hours go to the next hour: halv fire is 3:30. Quarters are kvart over tre (3:15) and kvart i fire (3:45). Minutes in between are counted to and from the half hour: fem minutter i halv fire is 3:25, which is the point where most learners give up and say tre femogtyve. Danes accept both.
Years
Years before 2000 are said in hundreds: 1999 is nitten hundrede og nioghalvfems. From 2000 they are said as numbers: 2026 is to tusind og seksogtyve.
Dates
Dates use ordinals: den femtende marts, the fifteenth of March. The ordinals up to 12 are their own words (første, anden, tredje, fjerde, femte, sjette, syvende, ottende, niende, tiende, ellevte, tolvte); from 13 you add -nde or -ende: tyvende, enogtyvende. Your birthday is the date you need first.
Ages, buses and floors
Jeg er toogtredive år, I am 32. Bus fem A. Jeg bor på tredje sal, I live on the third floor, where the Danish third floor is the English third floor, not the fourth; the ground floor is stuen.
How to actually learn them
- Learn the tens as words. Five minutes a day for a week: tyve, tredive, fyrre, halvtreds, tres, halvfjerds, firs, halvfems. Out loud.
- Listen to prices. Every shop, every day, before you look at the display. Guess, then check.
- Say your own numbers. Your phone number, your address, your birthday, your age, your postcode. Those five you need before anything else.
- Use the machine above like flashcards. Type a random number, say it, then hear it.
The free course has a longer version of this: the tens as blocks you can see, listening exercises with random numbers, prices and phone numbers, a clock you can set, and a machine that also does prices, years, times and dates, with the exercises checking what you type and telling you where the mistake is, without showing you the answer.
Questions people ask
Do Danes find their own numbers hard?
No. Children learn halvtreds as a word, the way English children learn “fifty” without knowing it was once “five tens”. What Danes find hard is other Scandinavians laughing at them.
Can I just say femti and seksti like in Swedish?
You will be understood, and for a while in the 1950s the forms femti, seksti, syvti, otti, niti were even used in banking for clarity. In speech they sound foreign. Learn the real ones; it is five words.
Why are the ones first?
Because Danish is a Germanic language, and German, Dutch and old English do the same: “four and twenty blackbirds”. English dropped it; Danish did not.
Updated 13 September 2026