There's a nursery rhyme, Sing a Song of Sixpence, which has "Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie", so numbers were once written out in English the same wa

There's a nursery rhyme, Sing a Song of Sixpence, which has "Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie", so numbers were once written out in English the same way they are in German. I checked the King James version of the Bible (1605), which consistently writes out numbers in this way, e.g. Leviticus 12.4: And she shall then continue in the blood of her purifying three and thirty days ... Genesis 11.16: And Eber lived four and thirty years, and begat Peleg ... Genesis 11.12: And Arphaxad lived five and thirty years ... What about more recently? In David Copperfield (1850) by Charles Dickens, we still find: About five-and-twenty boys were studiously engaged at their books when we went in ..." ‘Six-and-thirty years ago, this day, my dear,’ said my aunt, as we walked back to the chariot, ‘I was married.