Number and currency patterns

Number formats introduction

Pre-requisite topics to read:

Numbers are formatted using patterns, like "#,###.00". For example, the pattern "#,###.00" when used to format the number 12345.678 could result in "12'345,67" if the grouping separator for your locale use an apostrophe ('), and the decimal separator is a comma (,).

Whenever any of these symbols are in the English pattern, they must be retained in the pattern for your locale. The positions of some of them (%, ¤) may be changed, or spaces added or removed. The symbols will be replaced by the local equivalents, using the Number Symbols for your language. (See 💡 Helpful Tips below the table)

💡 Translation Tips

Types of Number Patterns

There are four general-purpose number patterns supported in CLDR: decimal, currency, percent, and scientific.

Remember that the "." and "," are placeholders and do not mean the literal characters: computer programs that use CLDR will change them to the right number symbols for your language as explained in the section above.

The currency formats have two types (standard and accounting); each of these may have up to two additional alternate forms (-alphaNextToNumber, -noCurrency) as descibed in the table below.

Miscellaneous Number Patterns

Compact decimal formatting

There are also patterns for compact forms of numbers, such as the such as "1M" and "1 million". These patterns may be substantially different across languages, as shown by comparing the English patterns to the Japanese patterns in the table below. These patterns also have plural categories.

The compact currency formats can have  an -alphaNextToNumber variant, as with the regular currency formats. Ther eis usually no need to provide a -noCurrency variant, since if that is not present the compact decimal formats will be used. However if those are not equivalent to what the noCurrency variant would be, then a separate -noCurrency variant of the ompact currency formats may be provided.


When computer programs use CLDR, the number of decimals can be changed by computer programs according to the task its designed for. For example, the pattern for 10,000 in the table below (00K for English, 0万 for Japanese) may be modified to have more or fewer decimals — it could be changed to have 3 digits of accuracy: 00.0K for English, 0.00万 for Japanese.

💡 Translation Tips

Plural Forms of Numbers

Some languages have multiple plural forms for numbers, and will have multiple plural categories for each number. See Plural Rules and Tool for numbers mapped to the various plural categories. 

X digit-one

X digit-two

Xdigit-other