When To Shorten (Apocopate) Ciento

From the mailbox:

In the below, why isn't it cien instead of ciento?

[Taken from the email course "Dichos, refranes y citas"] Más vale el pájaro en mano que ciento volando.

(The sentence literally means "The bird in hand is worth more than 100 flying," the equivalent of the English proverb "A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.")

You're right that ciento (the word for "hundred") is sometimes shortened to cien; that's a process known as apocopation, and the same thing can be done to a few other words, such as grande and primero. However, this shortening is done only before a noun, as in cien casas, or "100 houses," where casas is a noun, or before a noun phrase, as in las cien mejores canciones ("the 100 best songs").

In the sentence you gave, volando is not a noun — it's a verb form known as a gerund or present participle. Here, the gerund is used to indicate that the birds are in the process of performing an action — in this case flying. Ciento here, by the way, is functioning as a pronoun, and pronouns are never shortened through apocopation, only certain adjectives.

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