Sometimes one needs to produce a text in which many numbers have to be written out in words. Writing such a text and ensuring it is error-free can be a burden, especially if the author is not fluent in the language. Such may occur when working on a reference grammar, a research paper or presentation, or a problem on number names for a contest in linguistics. A remedy is to prepare the text with TEX and let some parts be generated automatically. The human effort this takes is to compose a grammar that describes the features of the numeral system. This paper discusses how this is done.

This paper presents a contrastive investigation of linguistic problems based on number names in different languages and intended for secondary-school students. We examine the eight problems of this type that have been assigned at the International Linguistics Olympiad throughout the years and compare the phenomena in the number systems featured there with those of the working languages of the Olympiad and other languages known to be familiar to the participants. On the basis of a statistical analysis of the results achieved by the contestants we draw conclusions regarding the ways in which the difficulty of a problem depends on its structure and the kinds of linguistic phenomena featured in it.