Four Arabic grammar rules that make number-to-words conversion uniquely complex

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A developer maintaining an Arabic number-to-words converter (tafqeet), used for invoices and cheques, has detailed four linguistic rules that break naive digit-by-digit translation approaches. Unlike English, Arabic places units before tens, so 25 becomes 'five and twenty,' meaning left-to-right concatenation produces grammatically incorrect output. Arabic also requires numbers three through ten to take the opposite grammatical gender of the noun being counted, making the correct word for a digit dependent on the currency in use. Additionally, the form of a counted noun changes based on whether the last two digits fall in the range 3–10, 11–99, or are an exact hundred, requiring plural, accusative singular, or plain singular forms respectively. A fourth rule governs the dual form, where 'مائتان' must drop its final letter and become 'مائتا' when directly followed by a noun, a single-character difference that proof-readers and bank clerks immediately flag as an error.

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