In my native language, we use a colon and a hyphen after a price to show that there are no decimals involved, so, we write for instance €10:- to show that the price is ten euros exactly; not, say, ten euros and five cents.
Now I'm wondering if you have something similar in English, and if so, if there's a difference between BrE and AmE.
Edit: I have now found some weak support for a long dash: $10— Is there anyone who can corroborate this use?
Also, if you use .00, how do you use this with non-specified sums of money? Like, I would write €xx:- to indicate that a price will always be without decimals. Would you write €xx.00 then?
(Also, if someone can think of further tags for this question, I'd be very grateful if you could just add them 🙂 )
Thank you!
Best Answer
American English.
I would say something costs "ten dollars" which implies "ten dollars and no cents." But it's possible that I'm rounding; in casual speech, and especially when comparing two items at different price points, I might say that a product with a price of $9.88 costs "ten dollars." So to make it clear that the price is really $10.00 I can say "ten dollars even" or "ten dollars flat," emphasizing the fact that there is nothing in the price besides the ten dollars.
When writing the price using Arabic numerals I can use just
$10which (again) implies the absence of any additional cents, or I can explicitly write out the zeros by using$10.00.Regarding your edit: Using a long dash to indicate "and no cents" (
$10—or$10.—) is old-fashioned usage that I have seen more often in the context of handwriting, it being faster to draw a single horizontal line than to mark a zero and another zero. In the era of computers and keyboards I would call that practice obsolete.I do not think there is standard marking to indicate "a set of prices which will always be an integer number of dollars." You would just have to say it in longform as I did there.