How to Say the Years: Twenty Hundred

For March we are doing some rudimentary republic rehab. Repeat after me: "twenty hundred."

For here is the moment you went off track, America. Pronounce these years:

1800
1900
2000

Eighteen hundred, nineteen hundred, twenty hundred. Right around 1995, when you were already stupefying yourselves with Windows 95 and the OJ trial, you started obsessing on the 2, and among the Y2K silliness you forgot some things you already knew. You lost some vocabulary.

So let's exercise that atrophied ability:

1901 Nineteen oh-one
2001 Twenty oh-one
1910 Nineteen ten
2010 Twenty ten
1984 Nineteen eighty-four
2084 Twenty eighty-four

It's a serial number, not a quantity. I was not born in 1,968.

OK— next week we'll do decades.

Some good news, when I said twenty hundred the computer typed 2000. Google Books Ngram Viewer, year 2000, millennium, 1970-2022. "Conan & Andy - In the Year 2000 #1 (1997-01-01)," https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmzpdd4pWvM&t=121s. Robert Wellman Campbell, "How to Say the Years: Twenty hundred," RSS Longa, 12 March 2026, public domain via CC0 1.0.