Q. A quandary: I’m seeing September 11th (added “th”) in the New Yorker magazine, where editing is usually superb, but somewhat antiquated. The New York Times refers to the date as Sept. 11 or 9/11. Please give me a rundown of your recommendations for this particular date, including use as an adjective (September 11 tragedy?). Or is it still too soon to have a set standard? Thanks. I’m probably the 911th person to ask you this.
A. In written text, Chicago’s rule is to write a cardinal rather than an ordinal, even though the number may be pronounced as an ordinal:
the events of September 11
the September 11 tragedy
September 11, 2001
When a day alone is mentioned, it is usually in the form of an ordinal but spelled out:
September 10, 2001, was the last day of its kind in the United States. The tenth will therefore always be important, even as it stands in the shadow cast by the eleventh.
As for an abbreviated form for September 11, “9/11” works fine (but see CMOS 9.35).
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. In the admittedly rare circumstances when you want to write out the name of a large number, are there any agreed-upon guidelines for the usage of the word “and”? Is it “six hundred seventy-two” or “six hundred and seventy-two”? I was taught the former in grade school; a colleague was taught the latter, equally adamantly. I should note that said colleague is Canadian; is this perhaps a question of American versus British usage? All consulted manuals are, inexplicably, silent on the matter.
Q. In prose, when writing percentages, which is correct: 10 percent; ten percent, or 10%?
A. Chicago prefers the use of numerals for all numbers used as part of percentages, but use the word “percent”
for humanistic copy and the “%” symbol for scientific and statistical copy:
humanistic:
10 percent (but spell out “10” if it begins the sentence)
scientific, statistical:
10%
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. Dear style gurus, the rule is to always use the numeral with “percent,” as in “1 percent, 100 percent, etc.” Our question concerns “zero percent.” I say it should be spelled out, because your numeral rule applies to “numbers ONE through one hundred.” My co-worker says, nope, you’ve got to use 0. Who’s right? What’s the rule?
A. Our rule is that all percentages and decimal fractions are set in numerals, in humanistic as well as scientific copy. The only exception is for the beginning of a sentence:
Zero percent of American-born participants in a recent poll could remember where they were—not to mention what they were doing—when Theodore Roosevelt was charging up San Juan Hill.
The ideal income tax, some people say, would be 0 percent of net income.
The seventeenth edition of CMOS makes this clear: Chicago’s general rule is to spell out zero through one hundred. See paragraph 9.2.
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. If numbers must be written out by using words, are commas added in the same places as they would be used for digits? Example:
23,504,070; twenty-three million, five hundred four thousand, seventy. Thanks!
A. No commas should be used when numbers are written out:
103,000 = one hundred three thousand
The longer the number, the more awkward it may seem, but commas would make the number look like a series of smaller numbers,
something that doesn’t happen with numerals because there are no spaces, for one thing.
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. I’m muddling through a budget document, and I cannot remember (i.e., figure out) whether dollar amounts are singular or plural. When written out at the beginning of a sentence, it seems to me that the plural works better, since the subject of the sentence seems clearly to consist of more than one item (Seven thousand dollars are needed for . . .). When presented as $7,000, though, the amount appears to be a singular subject.
Ordinarily, I would dodge the whole issue by using the active rather than the passive voice, but local custom is to place the number first in the sentence (I think that’s so our readers won’t have to waste time reading the document to see how we came up with such outrageous budget requests).
I’ve just moved, and I haven’t yet located my CMOS (I should have marked that box in neon orange); can you help?
Q. I am editing some reports for my college. I had some good times in the ’60s, was educated in the ’70s,
worked in the ’80s and ’90s, but the ’00s confuse me. What
do we call them?
A. It is lucky that the ’20s, ’30s, ’40s, . . . ,
’90s are so easy to talk about; it is unfortunate that the, um, zeros? ’00s? aren’t.
In writing, “the ’00s” perhaps looks okay, but it reads
horribly (the zeros? the aughts?); so, what does one say? I seem to recall that people writing about the first decade of the
last century would say things like “in the first decade” or “at
the dawn of the century” or “at the turn of the century”
or something like that, phrases which lack economy and sometimes precision. Fewer writers speak of the “teens,”
an expression that Chicago doesn’t favor. In any case, one can always use numerals: 2000–2009
or 2010–2019. That said, I wonder if and when something better will be dreamed up and successfully adopted.
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]