What is the smallest number (in English) that uses all five vowels exactly once each?

For example, the number “eighty thousand” uses each of the vowels a, e, i, o, u exactly once. (And as a bonus it even has the “sometimes vowel” y.)

Needless to say, there are smaller numbers which meet the condition!

Have a think about it. Your answer might even be different depending on whether you use US English or British English…

Tomorrow I will post some of the answers I have been offered when asking this question. Many of them are quite ingenious.

I am taking a couple of days’ break from Japanese to post something else language-related. Well…it’s at the intersection of language and mathematics. This has been in my drafts folder a while so I wanted to bash it out.