English numerals

English number words include numerals and various words derived from them, as well as a large number of words borrowed from other languages. Cardinal numbers refer to the size of a group. In English, these words are numerals. If a number is in the range 21 to 99, and the second digit is not zero, the number is typically written as two words separated by a hyphen. In English, the hundreds are perfectly regular, except that the word hundred remains in its singular form regardless of the number preceding it. So too are the thousands, with the number of thousands followed by the word "thousand". For the number one thousand it may be written 1 000 or 1000 or 1,000, for larger numbers they are written for example 10 000 or 10,000 for ease of human reading. The use of the , as a separator is avoided in some languages as it is used for a decimal placement, for example with money. As a result some style guides recommend avoidance of the comma (,) as a separator and only to use the period (.) as a decimal placement. Thus a half would be written 0.5 in decimal, base ten notation, and fifty thousand as 50 000, and not 50.000 nor 50,000 nor 50000. As the English language has no language academy to make usage correct there is still a wide variety of usage, other languages do have language academies which ruled on these matters, yet their rulings are deprecated by international standards like the SI system or EU recommendations which leads to varied usage. In American usage, four-digit numbers are often named using multiples of "hundred" and combined with tens and ones: "eleven hundred three", "twelve hundred twenty-five", "forty-seven hundred forty-two", or "ninety-nine hundred ninety-nine". In British usage, this style is common for multiples of 100 between 1,000 and 2,000 (e.g. 1,500 as "fifteen hundred") but not for higher numbers. Americans may pronounce four-digit numbers with non-zero tens and ones as pairs of two-digit numbers without saying "hundred" and inserting "oh" for zero tens: "twenty-six fifty-nine" or "forty-one oh five".