This bit from HBO’s Silicon Valley cracked me up:

Some kid is pitching his revolutionary startup idea to entrepreneur Elrich Bachman:

Kid: Here it is: Bit… soup. It’s like alphabet soup, BUT… it’s ones and zeros instead of letters.

Bachman: {silence}

Kid: ‘Cause it’s binary? You know, binary’s just ones and zeroes.

Bachman: Yeah, I know what binary is. Jesus Christ, I memorized the hexadecimal times tables when I was fourteen writing machine code. Okay? Ask me what nine times F is. It’s fleventy-five. I don’t need you to tell me what binary is.

We infer that “fleventy-five” is a hexadecimal number, commonly used in coding; presumably it’s 0xF5 (which is not 0x9 times 0xF, as it happens). But instead of saying “eff-five” for the byte 0xF5, Bachman has come up with some kind of novel system for the English-ification of hex digits.

He’s on to something. We have ordinary English words for decimal numbers, with names based on the digits and their place-value. “Seventy” is the word for two-digit chunks starting with the digit seven, for example. It might appear in the number “seventy-three”, or “five hundred seventy-one thousand”; both numbers with a 7 digit in an appropriate place. “Fleventy”, then, would be the number for two-digit chunks starting with F.

Hex only adds more kinds of digits (the symbols A through F). Could we follow Bachman’s lead and add more number-names for the extra digit symbols, and pronounce hex just like a decimal number? Could we have a system that attains the unwieldiness and syllable count of spoken English numbers, with all the respectable seriousness of saying the word “fleventy”?

I’m glad you asked. This has never been done before , but fear not; here are the official new number-words for hexadecimal. You may start using them immediately:

Hex Place value Word 0xA0 “Atta” 0xB0 “Bibbity” 0xC0 “City” 0xD0 “Dickety” 0xE0 “Ebbity” 0xF0 “Fleventy”

I think it would help to solidify this with some examples:

0xB3 “bibbity-three”

0xF5 “fleventy-five”

0xE4 “ebbity-four”

0xA7 “atta-seven”

0xC5 “city-five”

0xDB “dickety-bee”

Higher place values

But really, we must go further. What about numbers larger than a byte? We have the words “hundred” and “thousand” for decimal place values higher than ten, so why not something for hex place values higher than 0x10? Say, for multiples of 0x100?

For this, I propose “bitey”.

Resulting in:

0xDAF1 “dickety-A bitey fleventy-one”

0xE137 “ebbity-one bitey thirty-seven”

0xA0C9 “atta-bitey city-nine”

0xBBBB “bibbity-bee bitey bibbity-bee”



Naturally, we could make yet larger numbers by devising some names for larger place values, and combine them with intermediate values, in the same way that we compose decimal numbers like “thirty thousand” or “six hundred fifty one million”. As in English, place value names could be dropped if you’re feeling brief. We’ll also need hex-digit words for the “teens”.

Try it

I’ll leave you to explore the new naming system with this toy:

Say place values

How we’ve conversed about hex without a system like this is beyond me. You’re welcome.