1,000,000 in French
Un Million, with the De Rule

Why Million Behaves Differently from Cent and Mille

French splits its number words into two grammatical classes. The first class is the determiners: un, deux, trois, all the way through vingt, trente, quarante, cinquante, soixante, cent, and mille. These attach directly to the noun they quantify, with no preposition in between. You say vingt euros, cent personnes, mille soldats. There is no link word.

The second class is the quantitative nouns: million, milliard, billion, douzaine, dizaine, vingtaine, centaine. These behave like ordinary nouns. They take an article (un, une, le, la), they pluralise (millions, milliards, douzaines), and they require the preposition de before whatever they are quantifying. So you say un million d’euros, une douzaine d’oeufs, une dizaine de personnes.

This split is documented by the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française in its entries for cent, mille, million, and milliard, and explained at length in the Banque de dépannage linguistique of the OQLF. The historical reason: million entered French in the late Middle Ages from Italian banking practice, after the core determiners had already calcified. It came in as a noun and never converted to determiner status.

Knowing which class a word belongs to tells you everything: whether it needs de, whether it can take a plural-s, whether it can stand alone with an article. Million is in the noun class. Treat it like one.

The De Rule, in Practice

The single most common mistake English speakers make with million is dropping the de. In English we say “one million people” with no link word. In French the equivalent is un million de personnes, with de doing the prepositional work. Drop the de and the sentence becomes ungrammatical. Un million personnes is wrong everywhere, in every register, in every dialect of French.

The same applies to compound amounts. If a number ending in millions immediately precedes a noun, you need the de. Trois millions d’habitants, quinze millions de tonnes, cent millions d’années. Before a vowel the preposition elides to d’ (apostrophe + word).

There is one exception. When the number after million is itself another number (not a noun), the de drops. Un million cinq cent mille euros (1,500,000 euros) does not have de between million and cinq, because cinq cent mille is a continuation of the count, not a separate quantified noun. The de appears only at the boundary where you transition from counting words to the thing being counted: un million cinq cent mille euros still has zero de, because euros is plural and is being counted by the determiner mille (which is the closest counting word). The de rule kicks in when the number ends with the noun millions directly: deux millions d’euros.

Most French style guides simplify the rule to: write the number, look at what counting word ends it. If that word is million, milliard, billion, milliardième, or any other quantitative noun, insert de (or d’) before the counted thing. If it ends in a determiner (cent, mille, vingt, etc.), do not insert de.

Pluralisation: Deux Millions, with the S

Million pluralises like any other noun. Un million, deux millions, trois millions, quinze millions, cent millions. The plural-s is written and is audible in liaison contexts (the s links into a following vowel: deux millions et demi reads as deux millions-z-et demi).

Compare this with cent, which takes a plural-s only when it ends the number and is multiplied: deux cents (200, with s) but deux cent un (201, without s) because another number follows. Cent is a determiner; its plural rules are conditional. Million is a noun; its plural is unconditional.

The same noun-plural pattern applies to milliard (billion in English) and billion (the false-friend trillion in English): deux milliards, trois billions. See the dedicated page on un milliard, the false friend with English billion.

Worked Examples

French Digit Grouping: Spaces, Not Commas

One million in French numerals is 1 000 000, with thin spaces between groups of three digits. That is the convention recommended by the BIPM SI brochure for all SI usage worldwide, and it is the rule applied by the Légifrance French legal-text publishing system, the Imprimerie nationale, and the major French dailies (Le Monde, Le Figaro, Libération).

The comma in French is reserved for the decimal separator. 3,14 is the French way to write pi (three point one four). Writing 1,000,000 in a French context creates real ambiguity: a French reader scanning quickly may see the first comma and parse 1,000,000 as “one point zero zero zero comma zero zero zero”, which makes no arithmetic sense. The English-style comma-grouping is one of the most common typographic errors in poorly-edited French translations.

For finance and accounting, the same space-grouping convention applies: 1 200 500,75 EUR means “one million two hundred thousand five hundred euros and seventy-five cents”. The space groups the integer part; the comma separates the decimal. This is also the rule documented in the ISO 80000-1 standard, which French statistical and scientific publications follow.

Common Contexts Where 1,000,000 Appears

Population. France has roughly soixante-huit millions d’habitants (68 million inhabitants). Paris has about deux millions d’habitants intra-muros; the broader Île-de-France region holds douze millions d’habitants. Every population statistic uses the de-preposition because millions ends the number and habitants is the counted noun.

Money. A French lottery jackpot of one million euros is announced as un million d’euros. A property worth two million is deux millions d’euros. National budgets are quoted in milliards (billions) but at the personal-finance scale, millions dominate. See the dedicated money amounts in French page for cents, decimals, and large sums.

Distance and astronomy. The Sun is at cent cinquante millions de kilomètres from Earth (150 million km). One light-year is roughly neuf mille cinq cents milliards de kilomètres, which uses milliards rather than millions because the figure is in the tens of trillions of metres. Scientific French follows the same SI digit-grouping conventions as engineering French.

Industry and manufacturing. Production figures, for example car output or oil barrels, are often expressed in millions: la France a produit deux millions de véhicules en 2024. The INSEE French national statistics institute publishes most of its production data with millions as the natural unit and the standard de-preposition.

Mistakes English Speakers Make

Dropping the de. Un million euros is wrong; it must be un million d’euros. The same applies to millions in any plural compound.

Confusing million with milliard. The English “billion” corresponds to the French milliard, not the French billion. The French billion means a million million, that is 10^12, which English calls a trillion. A French government report quoting un billion means a thousand times more than an English-speaking reader would assume. See 1 billion in French for the full false-friend table.

Using a comma as the thousands separator. 1,000,000 looks correct to an English-speaking eye but reads as a malformed decimal in French. Use a thin space, 1 000 000, or in informal handwritten contexts a small dot or apostrophe. Never use the comma.

Forgetting the plural-s on millions. Deux million without the s is a typo. Million is a noun and pluralises every time it is multiplied. Same for milliard, billion, billiard, trillion.

Frequently Asked Questions