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Eleventy What?

Posted by Cliff on Tue Apr 01, 2003 07:11 PM
from the pronouncing-hexidecimal dept.
Programming IT Technology
TheFr00n asks: "I recently managed to teach my ten year old son the hexadecimal number system, but he shot me back a question that has me stumped. How does one pronounce hex, after the first iteration? In decimal, we have nice words like 'fifty' and 'sixteen'. Is there an official way of pronouncing a hexadecimal number like CF9? 'See hundred and effty-nine'? (which is totally wrong anyway because a hundred is 64 in hexidecimal) Any thoughts?"
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  • Maybe (Score:3, Insightful)

    by David_Bloom (578245) <slashdot@3lesson.org> on Tuesday April 01 2003, @07:13PM (#5641596) Homepage
    Won't just "Cee Eff Nine" work?
    • Going along with this, for numbers in the "Hexithousands" (i made that up), use "scientific hexitation" (e.g. cee eff nine times eff to the sixty-fourth power)
      • If English doesn't float your boat, how about German

        tsay-eff-noin?

        Or french

        say-eu-neuf? (where eu is like Eu in Europe.)

        Or a variety of other languages? I am pretty sure we could find one you like. ^_^

      • Re:Maybe (Score:3, Informative)

        by KDan (90353)
        That's the official pronunciation for hex though.

        For anything other than decimal you're not meant to use "ten", "hundred", "twenty", etc. Eg:

        Binary: 1011 - One-Oh-One-One
        Octal: 7326 - Seven-Three-Two-Six
        Decimal: 4729 - Four thousand seven hundred and twenty nine
        Hexadecimal: 28ad - Two-Eight-A-D

        Simple, huh?

        Daniel

        • Re:Maybe (Score:3, Insightful)

          by unitron (5733)
          "Binary: 1011 - One-Oh-One-One"

          Please be precise enough to use "zero" when pronouncing "0".

          "Decimal: 4729 - Four thousand seven hundred and twenty nine"

          There is no "and" in "4729".

  • DEADBEEF always works for me but there are some who would consider it BADC0DE... :)
  • There was a node on E2 about this, but I couldn't find it after searching for a few minutes. Anyone remember the title?
  • when this day is over.

    /me waits, watches the clock and clicks reload

  • Perhaps, (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Sevn (12012) on Tuesday April 01 2003, @07:24PM (#5641663) Homepage Journal
    If there was an actual need to speak these numbers,
    we'd have some slick as chit way to pronounce them.
    Necessity is the MUTHA of invention. Most people go
    around talking in base ten. Most people have no
    need at all for anything but base ten. Go figure
    it's what we have words for.

  • Color (Score:5, Funny)

    by David_Bloom (578245) <slashdot@3lesson.org> on Tuesday April 01 2003, @07:25PM (#5641669) Homepage
    Well, if it represented a color (#c0f090), I'd call it light green.

  • Heh (Score:3, Funny)

    by itwerx (165526) <itwerx@gmail.com> on Tuesday April 01 2003, @07:39PM (#5641742) Homepage
    "CF"
    "CF9"
    "CF9 with Jack and Jill"
    "Now F is tired"
    "CF sleep..."

    "69" comments are automatically modded redundant and posters will be assumed to have the mental age of an eggplant.

  • In all non-decimal systems.. (Score:5, Informative)

    by denubis (105145) <brian.technicraft@com> on Tuesday April 01 2003, @07:40PM (#5641752)
    This is, unfortunatly, a point that has been drilled into me by my Discrete Math profs.

    All non decimal systems pronounce the digits individally.

    E.g. 10 in base 2 is not "ten" but "one zero"
    And 734 in octal is "seven, three, four. Not seven thirty four, or variations on that theme.

    Hope this helps.
    • Yeah. And I had a teachers who insisted that "pretty" be pronounced to rhyme with "petty" (not "pity"), "err" rhymes with "slur" (not "air"), "nucleolus" is stressed like "alveolus" and "gigahertz" starts with a soft g. All correct I suppose, but rarely heard nowadays.

      I say "thirty-two hex" and even "thirty-two hundred hex" and "charlie thousand hex" on occasion. And my world hasn't collapseD43mjodu4trfk#*(%^&#)$)*(
      • GigaHertz, like giga-everything else, really does start with a "j" sound because it comes from the same root word as "gigantic". Back when microwave communications technicians were working those frequencies and computer people relied on ferrite beads strung on wires for memory there wasn't the present misunderstanding about this.
        • Has anyone ever pointed out to that person that the term used for cycles per second (as opposed to cycles per some other length of time) is the proper name Hertz, so that 1 cycle per second is 1 Hertz, and if you need a different term for singular and plural it would actually be Hertz and Hertzes? (If you're going to be wrong you might as well be accurate about it :-)
    • Twenty is a number. 20 decimal represents that number. 20 hex does not. It represents a different number.

      But the 2 and the 0 in 20H are still a two and a zero, so saying "two-zero hex" (where "hex" is optional if understood) is quite correct, while "twenty" is not.

  • Err, are not the names we give numbers independant of any notational system? i.e

    The number we have given the name two and is written as "2" in decimal, in binary is written 10, but it's still called two, just the notation changed. In hexadecimal, the number we call sixteen is written 10, but it's still called sixteen.

    Of course if you want say a number in a specific notation you'll need to not only spell it out but also state the system so as to avoid ambiguity ("the number `one-zero' in binary notation") as using the number's name implies the use of the decimal notation.

    If you ask somebody to write down some numbers, and you read them out as "one, two, three, four", the subject should be perfectly able to use the binary notational system to write them down as "01, 10, 11, 100", they've recorded the numbers you spake correctly.
    • There have been many, many comments along these lines here at slashdot (why would I expect more?), and it is just wrong.

      Twenty-three obviously represents a two in the second order digit and a three in the first order digit. In addition, our language has an implied base 10 marker, though not an inherent one. We did not name 2^6 number of sticks as "si-cs-ti-for", like we did a "pair" of sticks, we constructed that number out of a shared understanding of a base 10 numerical system.

      If you ask someone to wr
      • There's slightly more to it than that though, because the arabic numerals are named by base 10.

        The name of the numeral '2' is 'two'. The value of the numeral '2' is 2 in base ten, and any bases with a radix larger than 2.

        So, if I write, "what's 3 in binary?" you know that I mean I want 11 as the answer because you assume the 3 in the question is in a base higher than 2, so the numeral also has some implied value, and use beyond that of a symbol.

        Gee, this is challenging to describe in English... :)
  • I like it. Now I can write a satirical political novel about civil liberties lost through digital surveilance and call it '19A4'.

  • As a programmer 20 some years ago... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by DaoudaW (533025) on Tuesday April 01 2003, @09:07PM (#5642151)
    Finally something I know something about. "One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, able, baker, Charlie, dog, easy, fox, one-zero. One-one, one-two, one-three, one-four, one-five, one-six, one-seven, one-eight, one-nine, one-able, one-baker, one-Charlie, one-dog, one-easy, one-fox, two-zero. Two-one, two-two, two-three..." Three digit numbers likewise: "One-zero-nine, one-zero-able, one-zero-baker,..., nine-fox-fox, able-zero-zero."
    • Maybe correct 20 years ago, but you're a bit off on your phonetic alphabet no..

      Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo, Foxtrot

      (the rest .. Golf, Hotel, India, Juliet, Kilo, Lima, Mike, November, Oscar, Papa, Quebec, Romeo, Sierra, Tango, Uniform, Victor, Whiskey, X-ray, Yankee, Zulu).

      • Re:As a programmer 20 some years ago... (Score:4, Interesting)

        by DaoudaW (533025) on Tuesday April 01 2003, @09:49PM (#5642325)
        I've done that one when operating an aviation radio, but for hexadecimal I've only ever heard "able, baker, charlie, dog, easy, fox".
      • The "able Baker" phonetic alphabet was the OLD US and British Phonetic alpahabet (circa 1942). Post WWII it was changed, as some non native english speakers had serious problems with hearing/saying some of the words "Queen" vs "Quebec" is one of them

        Currently, in the US, there are 2 main forms of the Phonetic alphabet being used "Police" and International/Military. The Police version has some regional variations, but as almost all theri comms are intra department it does not matter (btw the 10 codes vary
  • Andy Rooney, for example, expounds on topics just as mundane and trivial as this one, every Sunday on 3C Minutes.
  • and you're right, there is no current answer.

    What needs to be done is to invent words that mean each of these symbols. When you say A in hex it is not the alphabet A, it's a totally different concept and needs a different word to express it.

    The best way would be to invent and standardize a set of words for speaking numbers/about numbers in base 16. Because, really, 10 would be pronounced "sixteen" which makes no sense. Base16(16) should be pronounced "16" and mean base10(22).

    It's a culture/language thing

  • dek el zen tris cat kink (Score:4, Interesting)

    by PurpleBob (63566) on Tuesday April 01 2003, @11:45PM (#5642664)
    Well, I don't know how to solve the problem of "hundred". But the digits can have names (and not just the letter names, which have the problem that they're hard to tell apart and A sounds like 8).

    On Everything2, there's the node Names for digits higher than 9 [everything2.com]. The names for the digits - I have no idea who created them - are "dek" for A, "el" for B, "zen" for C, "tris" for D, "cat" for E, and "kink" for F.

  • Donald Knuth Has The Answer (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Sunlighter (177996) on Wednesday April 02 2003, @01:53AM (#5642892)

    In section 4.1 of The Art of Computer Programming, Donald Knuth describes:

    ...a prominent Swedish-American civil engineer named John W. Nystrom [who] decided to... [devise] a complete system of numeration, weights, and measures based on radix-16 arithmetic. He wrote, "I am not afraid, or do not hesitate, to advocate a binary system of arithmetic and metrology. I know I have nature on my side; if I do not succeed to impress upon you its utility and great importance to mankind, it will reflect that much less credit on our generation, upon our scientific men and philosophers." Nystrom devised special means for pronouncing hexadecimal numbers; for example, [0xC0160] was to be read "vybong, bysanton." His entire system was called the Tonal System, and it is described in J. Franklin Inst. 46 (1863), 263-275, 337,348, 402-407.

    Maybe you should get that issue of that journal and give it a try.

    • quoted from http://www.monmouth.com/~colonel/tonal.html [monmouth.com]

      From Recreations in Mathematics, by H. E. Licks (Van Nostrand, 1917):

      John W. Nystrom of Philadelphia devised about fifty years ago the tonal system&quot of numeration in which 16 is the base instead of 10 as in the decimal system. The numerals 1, 2, 3, 4, etc., were called An, De, Ti, Go, etc., and new characters were devised for 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15. This system embraced also a new division of the year into 16 months, these having the names

  • I have the solution! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Michael.Forman (169981) on Wednesday April 02 2003, @04:38AM (#5643205) Homepage Journal

    I was really inspired by this question. It's a wonderful mix of mathematics and linguistics. Because a quick post to Slashdot couldn't cover it in enough detail, I wrote up some thoughts I had on the subject, which you can find here [michael-forman.com]. Also included is information on how Americans and Europeans differ in their transliteration of base-ten numbers.

    Here's an excerpt:

    How does one transliterate numbers of arbitrary bases? For example the number "562" is transliterated as "five hundred and sixty two" but how would one transliterate the hex number "0xDEADBEEF"? The text below attempts to answer that question using two methods. The first is a rigorous and technically accurate method but is difficult to use. The second is technically less rigorous but is simple to use ...

    Michael.

  • Yes (Score:4, Funny)

    by anthony_dipierro (543308) on Wednesday April 02 2003, @08:10AM (#5643622) Journal

    Is there an official way of pronouncing a hexadecimal number like CF9?

    "Three thousand five hundred seventy seven."

  • Keanu Reeves on Celebrity Jeopardy:

    Trebek: "And You wagered eleventy billion dollars. That's not even a real number"

    Reeves "...yet."

    Trebek "Simply stunning."

    Of course, I guess that's better than French Stewart's $Texas wager.
  • Does efty-1-ninety remind anyone else of the shop keep out of League of Gentlemen?

    This is local site for local people

    Rus

    • 159 is formally "one hundred fifty nine," not "one hundred and fifty nine."

      "And" is for decimal places, as in 159.7 = one hundred fifty nine and seven tenths.

      Says who? Where I come from, we put the "and" in. Do you have a World Government decree supporting your claim?

    • In the UK adding the "and" is correct, as is pronouncing the numbers after a decimal point individually.

      159.34 is "one hundred and fifty nine point three four".

      You'll only hear Americans and children who are just learning about decimals say "point thirty four" in the UK.

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