Numbers in Everyday Use: Age, Money, Quantity

You can recite the numbers one to a hundred perfectly and still freeze at a checkout, because real-life numbers come wrapped in fixed phrases: a particular word for age, a particular way to read a phone number, a quirk in how prices get spoken aloud. This page is about those wrappers. It assumes you can already form the numbers themselves (see the Numbers pages) and shows you how Norwegians use them — including the one place the old counting system stubbornly survives.

Age — jeg er X år (gammel)

The age phrase is a fixed pattern that catches everyone: jeg er + number + år (optionally gammel). Literally "I am X years (old)."

Three things to lock in. First, the verb is er ("am"), not "have" — so speakers of Spanish, French, or Italian must unlearn the I have 25 years pattern entirely. Second, the unit word is år ("years"), spelled with å, and it does not add a plural ending — it's tjuefem år, never tjuefems or år-er. Third, gammel ("old") is optional: jeg er tjuefem år and jeg er tjuefem år gammel are both fine, and dropping right down to jeg er tjuefem is perfectly natural in conversation.

Money — det koster X kroner

The currency is the krone (plural kroner), abbreviated kr or NOK. Prices use a small family of fixed phrases:

Note kroner stays in this plural form for any amount above one (to kroner, hundre kroner); only exactly one is én krone. Small change is øre (100 øre to the krone), though physical øre coins are gone and you'll mostly meet it in written prices like kr 49,90. In speech that price is read førtini nitti ("forty-nine ninety") — the krone-and-øre split is read just like the dollars-and-cents split in English.

Where the old counting survives — prices spoken aloud

Norway reformed its counting in 1951. The new system says tens-then-units: tjueén (21), femtitre (53), åttisju (87) — like English "twenty-one." The old system reversed it: énogtyve (one-and-twenty), treogfemti (three-and-fifty), like German and like Norwegian's own past. Officially the new system won. In real life, though, the old counting is still common in speech for certain things — and prices are the prime example, especially from older speakers.

So a shop assistant might quite naturally say a price the old way:

You do not have to produce the old forms — sticking to the new system (tjuefem, nittini) is always correct and never sounds wrong. But you must be able to understand the old ones, or a spoken price will ambush you. The give-away is the -og- ("and") in the middle and the unit coming first: femogtjue = five-and-twenty = 25.

Phone numbers — read in pairs

A Norwegian mobile number has eight digits, and they are almost always read in pairs, not digit by digit. So 90 54 32 11 is grouped 2-2-2-2 and spoken one pair at a time. And here the old counting really earns its keep: many speakers say each pair the old way (femtifire or fireogfemti for 54).

When you read your own number out, pairing it (and pausing between pairs) is what sounds native; reading eight separate digits sounds foreign and is harder for the listener to write down.

Vipps — the number that runs everyday payments

Vipps is Norway's near-universal phone-to-phone payment app, and "what's your Vipps number?" is an ordinary social question — splitting a bill, paying for a concert ticket, sending money for a shared gift. Your Vipps-nummer is usually just your mobile number, so the same pair-reading applies.

Note that Vipps has become a verb — å vippse ("to Vipps someone"), conjugated like any other: jeg vippser, jeg vippset deg i går ("I Vipps'd you yesterday"). It's the cleanest sign of how embedded the app is.

Quantities — the metric kitchen

Norway is fully metric, and quantities come with their own measure phrases. The key grammar point: after a measure word like kilo or liter, the thing follows directly with no "of."

Two orthography notes: there is no "of" — it's et kilo poteter, never et kilo av poteter. And halv agrees with the noun's gender like an adjective: en halv liter (common gender) but et halvt kilo (neuter), with the -t.

Percentages and temperatures

Two more everyday numeric contexts. Prosent ("percent") doesn't add a plural — tjue prosent, not prosenter. Temperature uses grader ("degrees"), and crucially Norwegians often drop the "Celsius" and even the word "degrees," and say minus for below zero.

In winter you'll constantly hear bare minus fem, minus ti — grader understood. Above zero, pluss exists but is usually dropped: just tjue grader.

Common Mistakes

Using "have" for age. A transfer error from Romance languages. Norwegian uses er ("am").

Pluralising år, prosent, or kroner wrongly. år and prosent never take a plural ending; krone does become kroner, but that's its fixed plural — don't add anything further.

Inserting "of" after a measure word. No av between the quantity and the thing.

Freezing on an old-counting price. Not your error to make, but the error of not recognising it. Femogtjue is 25, not some unfamiliar number.

Key Takeaways

• Age: være
  • number + år (optionally gammel); never "have," and år never pluralises.
• Money: det koster / det blir
  • number + kroner; én krone singular, kroner for everything else.
• Speak the new counting, but understand the old counting (femogtjue = 25) — it lives on in prices and phone numbers.
• Phone and Vipps numbers are read in pairs; å vippse is now a real verb.
• After kilo / liter / prosent, no "of," and halv agrees: en halv liter vs. et halvt kilo.