What does “virgola” mean in Italian numbers?

In Italian, “virgola” means comma, and it’s also how Italians mark and say decimals. Where English uses a dot (3.22), Italian writes a comma (3,22) and reads it out loud as “tre virgola ventidue” — three comma twenty-two. The comma splits the whole number from the part after it, and “virgola” is literally the word you say in its place. The dot, in turn, often groups thousands, so the two punctuation roles are swapped from the English habit.

So a price like €2,50 is spoken “due virgola cinquanta,” and a measurement like 1,75 m is “uno virgola settantacinque.” The spoken line here is “Tre virgola ventidue, cinquantaquattro, ventisette” — someone reading numbers aloud, with “virgola” sitting exactly where the decimal falls. The word comes from Latin “virgula,” a little stroke or rod (the small mark itself), the diminutive of “virga,” a thin branch. Useful to know going the other way too: when an Italian writes 1.000 they usually mean one thousand, not one — the dot there is a thousands separator, the reverse of English.