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Use of numbers
From one to nine, numbers are called digits and should be written in letters, except when they are used as units of measurement (including minutes, hours, days, months…) and in abbreviations.
L’utilisation des nombres
De un à neuf, les nombres sont appelés chiffres et doivent être écrits en lettres sauf pour les unités de mesure (y compris les minutes, les heures, les jours, les mois…) et les abréviations.
- Nine patients experienced major intra-abdominal complications after surgery; seven of these had an intra-abdominal abscess owing to leakage from the duodenal stump after subtotal gastrectomy.
From 10 onwards numbers should not be written in letters, except when they appear at the beginning of a sentence.
A partir de 10, les nombres ne sont écrits en lettres que lorsqu’ils sont utilisés en début de phrase.
- Classification of patients according to tumour stage was as follows: 33 were stage I, eight were stage II, 12 were stage III and one patient was stage IV.
A hyphen must be used in compound numbers.
Les nombres composés s’écrivent avec un trait d’union.
- Twenty-four patients underwent total gastrectomy and 30 had subtotal gastrectomy.
In English, decimals are expressed with the decimal point and not with a comma, as in French.
En anglais, les décimaux sont écrits avec un point décimal, et non pas avec une virgule comme en français.
- Patients who underwent total gastrectomy had higher scores in all dimensions of quality of life, but the differences were statistically significant only in the physical dimension (p = 0.034).