Have you ever thought about why the number 2 in 25 means something different than the 2 in 52? It’s the same symbol, but its value changes completely based on where it sits. This is the magic of place value.

Every number you see is built from just ten symbols, called digits. Think of them as building blocks.

By arranging these ten digits in different spots, we can write any number imaginable, from the price of a candy bar to the distance to the moon. Place value is the system that makes it all work.

Let’s start with whole numbers, the numbers you use for counting things like apples or books. Each place in a number has a name and a value. Starting from the right, we have the ones place, then the tens place, the hundreds place, and so on.

Each place is ten times more valuable than the place to its right. The tens place is worth ten times the ones place. The hundreds place is worth ten times the tens place.

Take the number 347. It’s made of three digits, but they don't all have the same weight.

• The 7 is in the ones place, so its value is just 7.
• The 4 is in the tens place, so its value is 4 tens, or 40.
• The 3 is in the hundreds place, so its value is 3 hundreds, or 300.

When we put them together, we get $300 + 40 + 7 = 347$.

But what about numbers that aren't whole? The decimal point is a small but powerful dot that separates the whole number part from the fractional part. Everything to the left of the decimal point is a whole number (1 or greater). Everything to the right is a fraction (less than 1).

The places to the right of the decimal point have names too. They're a mirror image of the whole number places, but with a "th" at the end. Instead of getting bigger by ten times as we move left, they get smaller by ten times as we move right.

The first spot after the decimal point is the tenths place. The next one is the hundredths place, followed by the thousandths place, and so on.

Now we can read any number. Let’s look at 25.68.

To read it, we say the whole number part, then say "and" for the decimal point, and then read the number to the right of the decimal and say the name of the last place value.

So, 25.68 is read as "twenty-five and sixty-eight hundredths," because the last digit, 8, is in the hundredths place.

Understanding place value allows you to see the true size of a number. You can see that 0.5 is much larger than 0.05, even though they use the same digits. The first is five tenths, while the second is only five hundredths. It's the foundation for almost everything else in math.