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I've got a quote from a German company for 36.000€. Does this mean 36 or 36,000?

It seems more likely to be 36,000 based on the value of what I am buying.

peterh
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O James
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    out of curiosity: Is the quote written in English or German? – Arsak Dec 04 '19 at 15:31
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    It is in English – O James Dec 04 '19 at 15:35
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    The normative reference for this, the so-called locale information is maintained by the Unicode consortium. – guidot Dec 04 '19 at 16:01
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    That's why it's wrong and ambiguous to use "," or "." as thousand separator, wherever you are, especially when no decimal separator is present. Either don't use any thousand separator, use a space or an apostrophe. "123.456" and "123,456" are both ambiguous, "123456", "123 456" aren't. – Eric Duminil Dec 05 '19 at 09:47
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    As currency amounts in Euro are normally not written with three decimals, it should indeed be 36000. – glglgl Dec 05 '19 at 10:07
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    "It seems more likely to be 36,000 based on the value of what i'm buying". This makes me wonder so much what kind of product could cost either 36 or 36,000€ – David Dec 05 '19 at 11:19
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    And youe 36,000€ means thirty six euros or thirty six thousand euros? It is not clear to me. – Vladimir F Героям слава Dec 05 '19 at 13:33
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    What @glglgl says. You will never ever see a price in Euros with more than two digits behind the decimal (comma/point) because the smallest currency unit is the cent! – Mr Lister Dec 05 '19 at 13:41
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    @MrLister "Never" is too hard a word. The prices per unit can sometimes be fractions of a cent, e. g. on the electricity bill where there are (at least in Germany) 4 or 5 components for the price per kWh. Or the price per L of petrol normally is something along of x,xx9 € per liter. But you are right in so far as the price which is to be paid is always a multiple of one cent. – glglgl Dec 05 '19 at 13:52
  • @glglgl Ah. Maybe I should go out more. – Mr Lister Dec 05 '19 at 13:54
  • @David Maybe minimum order quantity of a 1000 units? I am really curious what the quote is for as well! – Herman Dec 05 '19 at 14:39
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    @David there are many possible answers. Art (e.g. a painting), a piece of jewelry (if the material is not explicitly stated), a piece of furniture, something second-hand where you don't know if the seller knows that it's a valuable antique - these all come to mind. Or, a FOAF from a nonwestern country was once shocked and asked a seller if the panties she is looking at really cost 6 Euros (she was accustomed to prices in the cent range) and was informed that they are in fact brand-name lingerie for 60 Euros. Large price spreads within a category are not that rare. – rumtscho Dec 05 '19 at 15:59
  • 36.000€ is the yearly wage of an average commoner. – peterh Dec 05 '19 at 16:57
  • @David bottled alcoholic beverages is one possibility. 36€ would be a bit over entry level for a bottle of whisky or a fancy but not crazy expensive bottle of wine. 36000€ could be a collectable bottle of either. – Dan Is Fiddling By Firelight Dec 05 '19 at 18:05
  • @David Based on a question I saw yesterday on travel.se, it could be a purse. – user253751 Dec 06 '19 at 10:33
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    @David - It is not implied that some product can cost 36€ or 36,000€. The price could be for an unknown product. Maybe you need to pay for the tools somebody needed in a specific month. But a capital stock may also have any positive finite price. Even if you know how much share of which company it represents, it's not obvious whether it is 36€ or 36,000€. Possibly not even for the CEO. – Volker Siegel Dec 06 '19 at 23:56
  • "Does this mean 36 or 36,000?" – Actually, in Germany, those two are the same. (Outside of some specific context, where the number of decimals is used to denote numeric precision, i.e. "36,000" would be interpreted as "the real value lies somewhere within the interval [35,9995; 36,0005)" whereas "36" would be interpreted as "the real value lies somewhere within the interval [35,5; 36,5)".) – Jörg W Mittag Dec 07 '19 at 12:49
  • If the value seems closer to 36k then we are sorry to disappoint you ;-). – Peter - Reinstate Monica Dec 07 '19 at 17:03
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5 Answers5

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Yes 36.000€ is 36000 €. In Germany groups of thousands are separated by . and in exchange we have a decimal comma like 36.000,56 € as a result of: (36000 + 56 / 100) €.

Just to mention it: If there is a date, in German it would be: day.month.year, so 6.12.2019 (sometimes written as 6. Dezember 2019 or 06.12.2019) is Dec 6th, 2019.

mic
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    Please note for German date format: de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datumsformat#DIN_5008 . As following this DIN rule, the leading zeros can only be omitted when the month is not numeric. – help-info.de Dec 04 '19 at 20:13
  • In general, in German there is a space between the number and the symbol e.g. 36.000 €. One exception is the degree sign but Celsius is still separated e.g. 23° C – help-info.de Dec 04 '19 at 20:17
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    Maybe as an addition: Many Germans in certain fields, e.g. IT, are well aware of the difference of comma separators, but many don't. – Mark Lösche Dec 05 '19 at 07:28
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    @MarkLösche It's even worse if you are aware, but the software tries to compensate for it. So if you have a german locale on your windows installation, then Windows tries to accommodate you by using , as the decimal separator. The user, aware that . is the more common standard, attempt to use . and promptly don't get the result you had hoped for. It's a nightmare. – MechMK1 Dec 05 '19 at 07:48
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    And a LOT of people will omit the thousands separator completely to avoid ambiguity. This is of course universal, not specific to Germany. – jwenting Dec 05 '19 at 08:05
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    @help-info.de: 23 °C seems to be possible also. – pat3d3r Dec 05 '19 at 09:35
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    @MechMK1 I love it when I open a CSV file with a German Excel. In the same column, some numbers will be parsed as a string (e.g. "67.89"), while other numbers will be converted to dates ("1.5" as "1. Mai"). – Eric Duminil Dec 05 '19 at 09:45
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    @MechMK1 That's awkward for any UX. Normal text should be written as the human expects it - it is not that the human should know what a computer writes because it is considered common (by whom in which language?). Any German native speaker expects the decimal separator to be , in a German text. – rexkogitans Dec 05 '19 at 09:47
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    This ambiguity seems to be one of the reason Switherland uses ' as thousands separator. – glglgl Dec 05 '19 at 10:10
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    @help-info.de - In daily life nobody cares about such a norm. It will always be 6.12.2019, without leading zero. And if somebody write zeroes, he will also do it for the months. So, 06.07.2019 does not make it safe either. – mic Dec 05 '19 at 10:15
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    An empty space is more commonly used as thousand separator precisely to avoid this ambiguity, and is the norm as given by the PTB (for SI Units): https://www.ptb.de/cms/fileadmin/internet/publikationen/ptb_mitteilungen/mitt2007/Heft2/PTB-Mitteilungen_2007_Heft_2.pdf#page=34 (Point 5.3.4, Paragraph 3) – Polygnome Dec 05 '19 at 22:02
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    Please US, let's make a deal: We use your number separators if you use a sane unit for temperature. And if you just do not want to use the same units as others do, out of sheer American exceptionalism, use kelvin at least. – Volker Siegel Dec 07 '19 at 00:04
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    Not sure what the remark on the date format is doing here, it appears to be quite unrelated, other than also featuring the . character. – O. R. Mapper Dec 07 '19 at 10:15
  • @MarkLösche: I fully agree; in particular, the most commonly used German word for "decimal number" is "Kommazahl", based upon which many German native speakers probably wouldn't even get the idea that a "Kommazahl" might be written with something other than a "Komma" in other languages. – O. R. Mapper Dec 07 '19 at 10:18
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    I want to note that if you use the format 2019-12-07, it will work as well. I've started to use almost exclusively this format a few months ago, no matter if talking English or German, and nobody has ever asked what it means or why I'm using it. Also, @MechMK1, you can set which decimal separators, date formats etc. to use in Windows. You can even set ± as a decimal separator and ™ as a date separator if you want. – Fabian Röling Dec 07 '19 at 22:03
  • @FabianRöling I am aware, but many others might not be. And when you start mixing the concept of "language" and "locale" in Windows, then software can react in "unusual" ways. – MechMK1 Dec 08 '19 at 09:55
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As shown in the example usage on wikipedia, Germans use , as the decimal seperator and . to group to thousands.

Germany: 1.234.567,89
USA: 1,234,567.89

infinitezero
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  • Or, also often seen, will omit the thousands grouping and use either a comma or period for the decimal separator. Which is common practice around the world. – jwenting Dec 05 '19 at 08:06
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    @jwenting, using a decimal point instead of a comma when omitting thousands grouping is definitely not common in Germany. – lukad Dec 05 '19 at 09:45
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    In German typesetting, the use of a dot for grouping numbers is restricted to accounting contexts (and perhaps some fields of science). In good typesetting for general purposes (think of a popular science book or a newspaper or a printed encyclopedia) a non-separating thin space is to be used. – Christian Geiselmann Dec 05 '19 at 11:16
  • there is some development towards using nonbreakable spaces as the thousands separator, I saw it in a german Excel 2019 but don't know if it is a standard setting. the decimal point is here to stay as a misleading tradition and cause of errors. – dlatikay Dec 05 '19 at 11:25
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    Funny. I never realized that but USA really has to have everything their own way. – hopsinat Dec 06 '19 at 06:45
  • PS: by "non-separating" thin space I meant a non-breaking thin space, of course. – Christian Geiselmann Dec 06 '19 at 16:13
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Amounts in Euro will always have two decimal places - it has cents, not mils. However a price could have any, for example I've worked in telecomms and they used 4. They aren't the same thing - the latter is always per something or other (kg, megabyte, dozen). It should be obvious from the context which it is.

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    Yeah, in particular contexts prices can be to any number of decimal places. (For example, stock market prices are often quoted to 4 decimal places, but can be to 0, 2, 6, or 8 depending on the instrument and/or exchange.)  — However, in general usage, prices are almost always given to the smallest currency unit, which means 2 decimal places for EUR, GBP, USD, and most other currencies. – gidds Dec 06 '19 at 01:14
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    This is a (in my opinion) better answer than the higest-voted one. Another example would be exchange rates, gold price, or stock prizes, or gasoline. Those don't have two decimals places. Plus, although DIN says so, it can be dangerous to rely blindly on "comma means decimal comma, and dot means thousands group". The approach "go by context" makes the most sense. – Damon Dec 06 '19 at 14:57
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It is 36000 €. However, the , as the standard German decimal separator and the . as the standard German thousands separator are showing signs of weakness, at least at gas stations. See

enter image description here enter image description here enter image description here enter image description here enter image description here

Note that the price per liter is either shown in € with three decimals, the third decimal (which is always a 9) being depicted as a superscript and thus indicating its very special role, or in cents with one decimal. The only exception is example no. 3.

The rule is: Prices to be paid have at most two decimals (the decimals are frequently omitted if they are 00), prices per unit may have more decimals.

For prices you can frequently see also see the form € 12,- instead of € 12,00. In some restaurants you will € 12,8 instead of € 12,80, but this seems to be still unusual.

Paul Frost
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    It might have become uncommon, since the first "not full cent" I have also seen ,4 cent. I assume that it is just cheaper to use the dot: the comma needs space below and is "alone" there. The dot's bottom line fits into the number's bottom line. And additionally: one market more where to sell the same panels. – Shegit Brahm Dec 06 '19 at 08:13
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    Note that each of those displays uses a seven-segment display for each digit, except one which is a dot-matrix display. Perhaps the reason why a dot is used as the decimal point, rather than a comma, is that the hardware can't display commas or the software is written to display a dot. – Rosie F Dec 07 '19 at 09:03
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not just Germany uses a decimal comma, most of Europe do and many other countries...

USA: € 100,000.00 Europe: € 100.000,00

An interesting read on decimal points and commas can be found at this link (smartickmethod)

patrick
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  • Welcome to German.SE. Could you please include the "core information" from your link into your answer? Because the link might vanish one day and this might be before SE vanishes. – Shegit Brahm Dec 09 '19 at 07:08
  • Shegit, basically that site shows the difference in points and commas used around the world. Without just cutting all text from us the OP's original question's answer is put here, the link merely provides some additional reading on the decimal separator – patrick Dec 09 '19 at 07:53
  • My thoughts in mind were referencing to the help section about references: https://german.stackexchange.com/help/referencing . I'm far from saying your answer is link only. I just thought you might want to incorporate your knowledge with some arguments. Like "who is most of Europe" or what is the interesting part of the external reading. That's all. – Shegit Brahm Dec 09 '19 at 08:30