Writing Numbers and Dates

Writing numbers in Turkish involves three conventions that quietly contradict English: a period marks an ordinal (not a decimal point), a comma marks the decimal, and a period groups the thousands. On top of that, any grammatical suffix attached to a figure is set off by an apostrophe. None of these are hard once you know them, but every one of them is a trap if you assume Turkish punctuates numbers the way English does — and the period rule in particular can flip the meaning of a sentence.

Cardinals: digits or words

Cardinal numbers (one, two, three…) can be written either as digits or spelled out, and the choice is mostly a matter of register, exactly as in English. In running prose, small numbers are often spelled out (üç kişi "three people"); in technical, financial, and tabular contexts, figures are normal (3 kişi).

When a number is spelled out as words, each word is written separately — there is no run-together spelling: yüz yirmi beş "one hundred twenty-five," not yüzyirmibeş.

Ordinals are marked with a period

This is the single most important convention on this page. An ordinal number — first, second, third — is written as a figure followed by a period: 1. = birinci, 2. = ikinci, 3. = üçüncü. The period does not mean "point" and it is not a decimal; it is the written shorthand for the ordinal ending -(I)ncI.

English speakers find this strange because in English the period (full stop) is the decimal point — so to an English eye 3. looks like the start of a number such as 3.5. In Turkish that reading is impossible: a decimal would use a comma, never a period. This ordinal-period convention is shared with German (German writes 3. Stock for "3rd floor"), so if you have studied German it will feel familiar. If you have not, you have to retrain the reflex consciously.

Dates: day, month, year

Turkish dates run day – month – year, the same order as British English and most of Europe, and the opposite of American month-first dates. Written numerically, the parts are separated by periods or slashes: 15.06.2026 or 15/06/2026 means 15 June 2026.

When the month is spelled out, the day is a plain cardinal — 15 Haziran ("15 June"), not an ordinal — and month names are capitalised: Ocak, Şubat, Mart, Nisan, Mayıs, Haziran, Temmuz, Ağustos, Eylül, Ekim, Kasım, Aralık. Note that 15.06.2026 uses the period purely as a date separator here, not as an ordinal marker; context tells the two uses apart instantly because a date has the day-month-year shape.

Decimals use a comma; thousands use a period

Here Turkish reverses English exactly. The decimal separator is a comma, and the thousands separator is a period (or a space). So a price tag reading 2.500,75 TL is two thousand five hundred lira and seventy-five kuruş, not "2.5 million."

The decimal comma is read aloud as virgül ("comma"): 14,5 is on dört virgül beş, literally "fourteen comma five." If you carry over the English habit and write a price as 2,500.75, a Turkish reader parses the comma as the decimal point and the period as the thousands marker — reading it as roughly "two-and-a-half" rather than two and a half thousand. The convention is the standard continental-European one, so if you have seen prices in Germany, France, or Italy it will look familiar; the only thing that trips people up is the instinct, carried over from English, to reach for a comma when they mean "thousands." In careful typesetting the thousands group is sometimes written with a thin space instead of a period (2 000 rather than 2.000), but the period is by far the more common everyday choice and is what you will see on receipts, price tags, and in the news.

Percentages come before the number

The percent sign is written before the figure, not after: %50 = yüzde elli ("fifty per cent"). This mirrors how it is spoken — yüzde elli literally means "fifty in a hundred," with yüzde ("in the hundred") first.

Suffixes on figures take an apostrophe

When you attach a case ending, a plural, or any other suffix to a number written as a figure, you separate the suffix from the digits with an apostrophe, just as you do with proper nouns. The apostrophe keeps the reader from misreading where the number ends and the grammar begins.

The vowel inside the suffix is chosen by vowel harmony based on how the number is read aloud, not by the last printed digit. This is the subtle part. 1990 ends in the digit 0, but you read it bin dokuz yüz doksan, whose last spoken syllable is ‑san (a back vowel a) — so the locative is the back-vowel 'da: 1990'da. Likewise 7 is read yedi, ending in front i, so its locative is the front-vowel 'de: 7'de.

Common mistakes

The first error is the one to burn in: an English reader sees 3. and thinks "decimal." A Turkish reader sees 3. and thinks "third." Until that reflex flips, you will misread floor numbers, dates, and rankings.

Key takeaways

• Period after a numeral = ordinal ("‑th"): 3. is üçüncü, 21. is yirmi birinci. This is shared with German, not English.
• Decimals use a comma, thousands use a period — the exact reverse of English: 14,5 is 14.5; 2.000 is 2,000.
• Dates are day-month-year: 15.06.2026 = 15 June 2026; month names are capitalised; the day is a plain cardinal.
• The percent sign precedes the figure: %50 = yüzde elli.
• Suffixes on figures take an apostrophe, and the suffix vowel harmonises to how the number is read aloud: 1990'da, 7'de, 2025'te.