Nota bene: Tabular figures

Felix Salmon · 5 Jun 2018

Felix Salmon did not write this page.

Every claim below was made in this piece, quoted word for word and numbered in the order the piece makes them, so you can read it there rather than take our word for it. The sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording. Each quote was checked against a stored copy of the page at build time; where the two differ, the quote is the fact.

Our reading
Tabular figures should be used any time numbers appear outside a normal sentence.

Their wordsPretty much any time you're using numbers outside a regular sentence, you should be using tabular figures.
Our reading
The digit 1 is the leading digit in roughly 30% of naturally occurring numbers.

Their wordsThe number 1 is the most significant digit about 30% of the time.

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