Jul 18 2008
How to Write Someone’s Age
When writing a person’s age, my first suggestion is to exercise extreme caution.
Someone who has spent a fortune to look 40 and wants people to think she is 30 is not likely to thank you when you tell the world she is 50.
My next suggestion is more technical: Always use numerals to indicate a human’s or animal’s age, rather than spelling the number out.
Actually, this isn’t a suggestion. It’s a hard and fast rule, according to The Associated Press Stylebook. But you only have to remember it when referring to ages less than 10, since, as you already know, you should use numerals for numbers above nine anyway, only spelling them out if they are below 10 (with several exceptions, which we’ve addressed in another article). Let’s look at a few examples….
RIGHT: Bobby is 7 years old.
WRONG: Bobby is seven years old.
RIGHT: Janey is a 5-year-old rock star.
WRONG: Janey is a five-year-old rock star.
RIGHT: They were all in their 20s.
WRONG: They were all in their twenties.
RIGHT: Johnny is 7 and Susie is 5.
WRONG: Johnny is seven and Susie is five.
One last point: Notice the previous two sentences. When the context of a sentence doesn’t require the word “years” or the phrase “years old,” it is presumed that the number refers to years of age and not the person’s weight, IQ or number of inner demons.
