IELTS Spelling · Numbers and dates
Numbers and dates in IELTS Listening
Part 1 of the Listening test is usually somebody booking, joining or arranging something, which means it is full of numbers. They are the easiest marks on the paper and the easiest to throw away.
The short answer
Most lost number marks are not a failure of English. They are one digit, one missing hyphen, or a date written in an order the speaker never used. Decide in advance how you will write a number, a time and a date, and the problem mostly disappears.
Thirteen and thirty
The classic pair, and it is a stress problem rather than a sound problem. In thirTEEN the second syllable carries the weight; in THIRty the first does. The same for fourteen and forty, fifteen and fifty, and so on up. Speakers under no pressure to be clear run them together, and on a single pass you get one chance.
What to do: if you are not certain, listen for what follows. Thirty pounds and thirteen pounds sit in different sentences — a price, a quantity, an age, a room number all have their own plausible range. Context will usually decide it for you faster than replaying the sound in your head, and there is no replay anyway.
How numbers are said out loud
- Zero is often “oh” in phone numbers and codes. Oh seven nine is 079.
- “Double” means the digit twice. Double four is 44, not 8. Triple eight is 888.
- Large round numbers get spoken short. One fifty may be 150 or £1.50; fifteen hundred is 1,500.
- “And” belongs in the hundreds. Two hundred and six is 206 — the and is not a digit.
- Hyphens in written-out numbers. If you spell it in words, it is twenty-one, thirty-five, ninety-nine. One hyphen, between the tens and the units, and nowhere else.
Dates: pick one format and stop thinking about it
A speaker may say the third of April, April the third or just April third. All three are the same date, and the instruction on screen will tell you how many words you are allowed. The safe habit is to write the date the way it is normally written in English and in full: 3 April, or April 3 if you prefer. Avoid 3/4 and 4/3 — they mean different things on different continents and you are gambling for no gain.
If you do write the ordinal, the endings are worth having automatic: 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th … and then 11th, 12th, 13th, which break the pattern, and 21st, 22nd, 23rd, which go back to it.
Times, money and codes
- Times. Half past six is 6.30, not 6.50. A quarter to nine is 8.45 — the hour you hear is not the hour you write.
- Money. Put the symbol where it belongs: £45, $45, not 45£. If the recording says forty-five pounds fifty, that is £45.50.
- Reference codes. Mixed letters and digits are read out one at a time and often repeated. Write them in capitals exactly as heard, and watch the pairs that sound alike when spoken fast: M and N, S and F, B, P, V, D, E and G, and A and 8.
Practise these
Numbers reward drilling more than almost anything else in the test, because there is nothing to understand — only to recognise fast. Work through them with your eyes closed and your hands on a keyboard, not with a pen.
Practise numbers and dates by dictation
The Spelling trainer says a word once, in the accent you pick, and checks what you typed letter by letter — then gives you back only the words you missed.
Open the Spelling trainer →Three days free opens every test — Listening, Reading, Writing and Spelling — plus Vocabulary and Grammar in the app.
Questions people ask
Should I write numbers as digits or words?
Digits, unless the question obviously wants a word. Digits are faster, they are less likely to be misspelt, and a number counts as a number for the word limit on the screen.
Is 3/4 an acceptable way to write a date?
It is a bad idea. In Britain it reads as 3 April and in the United States as 4 March. Write the month as a word and the ambiguity never arises.
Do I need the comma in 1,500?
No, and it is safer without. Write 1500.
The other five groups
- Days and months — Wednesday, February, Tuesday and Thursday — twelve words and seven words, and a surprising number of lost marks.
- Place names — Street, Road, Avenue, and the town name the speaker spells out letter by letter at exactly the wrong moment.
- Personal names — Surnames spelled aloud, hyphens, apostrophes, and the letters that sound the same at speed.
- Plurals — The missing s, the words that are already plural, and the gap that has to agree with the sentence around it.
- Double letters — Accommodation, necessary, committee, occurred — the words where the only question is how many of each letter.
And the whole picture, with the marking rule and the accents, is on the Spelling trainer page. The words themselves come out of the Listening tests, which run in the computer-delivered interface here.
The marking rule — "words with spelling errors in the Reading and Listening tests will be marked as incorrect" — is IDP’s own wording on How to improve your spelling and Common spelling mistakes, both checked 2 October 2026; the same pages say British and American spellings are both accepted as long as you stay consistent. "You will hear the recordings once only" is from the official IELTS Listening format page, checked 2 October 2026. The two minutes to check at the end of the computer-delivered test, and the fact that the screen has no spell-check, are per the British Council’s paper versus computer guidance, checked 2 October 2026. The six groups of words below are how this trainer organises practice, not an official list. IELTS Computer is not affiliated with IDP, British Council or Cambridge.