The concept really is bullshit, and that's coming from a German. For certain kinds of triple digit numbers people sometimes resort to saying the single digits in a row ("drei fünf neun" instead of dreiundertneunundfünfzig). Less misunderstandings, and faster.

I've been learning German and I call it the surprise ending language because everything is like that. In complex phrases, you often leave the primary verb until the very last word. So you might get something like:

I'd like to, with your daughter and a duck, this coming weekend, at the park, if it's not raining, with our bicycles, go for a ride.

Just like dates in English!

In Belgium as well.

It even annoys me as a native, because it makes writing down a number someone else tells you irritating since it isn't in the same order.

That is why I usually just give single digits when telling someone a phone number.

Yes, I had to learn that too. It's weirder for sure, but not in the context of this specific graph since '4 - 20 - [0-19]' (80-99) still forms a neat cluster based on the first few letters.

I agree with the ridiculous. My kids were taught in primary school to write 123 as 1, 3 (with a blank after the 1) and the 2 (inside the blank). To this day I do not know if that is brilliant or stupid.

Also, we Germans do like our rules. If it works for 13-19, why change it 😎?

'1 - 1,000,000 - 900 - 7 & 80 - 1,000 - 600 - 4 & 50'

Large numbers are alway broken up into blocks of 3, pronounced like the initial numbers from 0 to 999 + the name of the long scale number (thousand, million, etc.).

Short scale, in english goes like this this: Thousand (3 zeros), Million (6), Billion (9), Trillion (12)...

Long scale, as used in german, goes like this: Tausend (3), Millionen (6), Milliarden (9), Billionen (12), Billiarden (15), Trillionen (18)...

Long scale kind of makes more sense since starting with Million the names just count upwards. Million, Bi-llion (2), Tri-llion (3), etc. But since you still start with Thousand in short scale, Billion is the 3rd, Trillion the 4th and so on. If you want to figure out Octodeci-llion (18), the formula to get the amount of zeroes in short scale is '18 * 3 +3' and in long scale '18 * 6'. Also keeps the names pronouncable for longer than short scale. However, it does make translating the names of large numbers between both languages a nightmare.

One million nine hundred seven and eighty thousand six hundred four and fifty

Let’s say you were plotting some temperature data. You take the temperature every day and record it for a month. When you go to plot the data, the normal thing to do is decide on the scale for the y-axis and then plot each temperature point according to where it fits on that scale. This allows you to see any trends in your data (perhaps it’s spring and the temperature is trending upwards over the month).

What you don’t do is sort your temperature data and then put the lowest temperature at the very bottom and the highest temperature at the top, with every other point spaced evenly between those extremes according to their rank. This completely obscures the relative temperature differences between the points!

Well this is what was done with the number words data we’re discussing. Look at the plot for English. Notice that zero is in the top left (because z is last in sequence), followed by one halfway up, which is also okay. But then look at two and three. You would expect two and three to be very close together because they both start with t, but they’re not. Words starting with t should be around 76% of the way up the y-axis (because t is the 20th letter of the alphabet) but two is at 99% of the way up and three is 77% of the way up.

This is problematic if you’re hoping to use the plots to spot trends. For example, with German (as another commenter pointed out) all 2-digit number words read the ones place before the tens place. If the data were plotted by cardinality (treating each word as a rational number between 0 and 1) then you’d easily spot this trend in German number words because all the points would fall on roughly horizontal lines.

All data points, from all series are sorted on the Y-axis relative to one another, not the external constant of the alphabet. This is contrary to how graphs are most frequently plotted and means that the shape of the data can change significantly, based upon the size of the dataset. It's not that it's an invalid way of plotting, just unusual and, personally, I don't like it.

Thanks now I get it! I assumed only the first letter counts, so every number that starts with z should be on the same height

But then “two” and “three” should be side by side no?

Edit: also “four” and “five”