What is the smallest number whose English name contains all five vowels, each one exactly once?
(In reply to
re: Quick guess and some other ideas. by Jer)
With the omission of the word 'and' (as it is not used in common American English vernacular for the names of numbers):
Permitted fractions, but requiring them to be irreducible, a possible answer is nine-thousandths (9/1000). Allowing the fraction to be reducible, a smaller (closest to zero) number would be 1/6000 expressed as ten sixty-thousandths (10/60000). If restricted to integers, but allowing the number to be expressed as a fraction, one might submit 8: thirty-two quarters (32/4), but, perhaps the smallest English name for a cardinal number (that uses each of the five vowels - a,e,i,o,u - is quaternion, which is an alternative English name for the number 4.
Different answers may also be possible by noting that American English is not the only English. South Asian (Indian) English, for instance, has lakh, crore, padm, and shankh for the names of some of the numbers. (These names are for numbers of a hundred thousand or greater, but it or other English languages may have different names for smaller numbers that could comply with the requirements of this puzzle.
Edited on March 5, 2013, 2:29 am
Edited on March 6, 2013, 12:35 pm
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Posted by Dej Mar
on 2013-03-05 01:33:01 |