The following article by Chris Tribble discusses the uses of words associated with numbers in the (Manchester) Guardian Weekly.

Numbers that we count on

A hundred days, thousand of victims, trillions of dollars of taxpayers' money. Counting things appears to be a central part of a journalist's job. I've been looking back through the Guardian Weekly archive to see what this paper does with the numbers.

Starting small, I looked at one to three - the cardinal numbers that are normally presented as orthographic words. Here I was surprised to see that the smaller the number, the more frequently it is used, with almost equal steps between one (82,002), two (48,894) and three (26,321).

All these numbers are used to count units of time - from second to century. However, one itself is the number most often used in developing arguments, being strongly associated with thing, point, time, hand and reason. Two is most strongly linked with counting men, children, people, sons, women and daughters. Three is used to count time and people, but is also found most frequently with quarters and decades.

.Looking at the big numbers, we see how the news focus zooms out from the local to the global. The things that are counted in hundreds include years, metres and kilometres, plus pounds and dollars. At the human level, there's the generally bleak quantification of people, deaths, civilians, killed, refugees and prisoners

In their thousands we find years then dollars and pounds and kilometres. Also in their thousands are the people who are involved in the news agenda: troops, fighters, refugees, civilians, displaced, protesters - and the outcomes of their actions: deaths and killed.

Once you helicopter up to the millions, things become more general with dollars, pounds and people, population, inhabitants, displaced, lives and (oddly) Americans. The only verb high up on the list is spent.

When you arrive at the billion level everything is dominated by money. There are dollars, pounds and euros, but there's also debt, budget and cost, along with spend and the more desperate pumped. The main things that are counted in trillions are dollar and yen, taxes and budgets. By this time individual people seem to get lost in the counting. I hope they don't get lost in the decision-making.