The English word "four" has 4 letters. Are there any other numbers where the English name for them has that many letters?

I have no idea how one could find this out.

71 points · 52 comments · view on lemmy.world

52 Comments

BananaTrifleViolin@lemmy.world · 52 pts · 1y (3 replies)

Yes: Five has four letters. Nine has four letters.

There are no more.

If you meant to ask if there are any more whole numbers with the same number of letters in the name as the number, then the answer is no. It is fairly simple to check - you only have to look at the numbers 0-30 before it becomes clear no other number will fit this pattern.

If you went into fractions like 20.12325 then there will be many numbers where all the letters added would get close but the fraction itself would mean you couldn't quite reach the exact number as you can't have fractions of letters.

If you included negative numbers then "minus eleven" has 11 letters. Minus thirteen has 13 letters. It seems to again break down once you go beyond 13, and its dodgy to include negative numbers as you can't have negative letters.

So, no.

WR5@lemmy.world · 23 pts · 1y (1 reply)

To your first point: zero also has four letters.

perfectly_boiled_pizza@lemmy.world · 8 pts · 1y

Inb4 anyone start saying mean things to eachother. There are a lot of people who have very strong opinions on this.

Btw the people who think it ISN'T can eat shit.

eldain@feddit.nl · 7 pts · 1y

Sigh. Time to introduce real letters that can be negative and fractional.

NONE_dc@lemmy.world · 43 pts · 1y (6 replies)

I don't know in English, but in Spanish the word for five, Cinco, has five letters.

SatyrSack@feddit.org · 34 pts · 1y (5 replies)

I was able to come up with a list of similar scenarios for various languages using a simple formula in LibreOffice Calc: =LEN(A2)=ROW(A2)-1 (row 1 being a header row)

Language Word Digit
Danish To 2
Danish Tre 3
Danish Fire 4
Dutch Vier 4
English Four 4
Finnish Viisi 5
French N/A N/A
German Vier 4
Indonesian N/A N/A
Italian Tre 3
Norwegian To 2
Norwegian Tre 3
Norwegian Fire 4
Polish N/A N/A
Portuguese Cinco 5
Spanish Cinco 5
Swedish Tre 3
Swedish Fyra 4
Turkish Dört 4
HK65@sopuli.xyz · 8 pts · 1y

In Hungarian, it's "négy", but it's actually only three letters, n, é and gy.

vatlark@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 1y

This is a clever solution

frank@sopuli.xyz · 4 pts · 1y (2 replies)

二 (pronounced and romanized to "ni") is 2 in Japanese and has two letters kinda

Same with 三(San)

Admetus@sopuli.xyz · 1 pts · 1y (1 reply)

We getcha but that's romaji which is a transliteration of the syllable sounds.

frank@sopuli.xyz · 1 pts · 1y

Yeah, but saying 一 has one Kanji and is One would be the only candidate and that's a little boring :p

Greg@lemmy.ca · 32 pts · 1y (1 reply)

two to power of four = 16

TheRealKuni@midwest.social · 2 pts · 1y

Beautiful.

Majorllama@lemmy.world · 30 pts · 1y (1 reply)

Yeah. Fivee. Siiiix. Seeveen. Eeeeight. Niiiiiiine.

lemmyng@lemmy.ca · 24 pts · 1y

Noel_Skum@sh.itjust.works · 29 pts · 1y (4 replies)

-9 (minus nine) kind of works if we’re getting desperate.

JK_Flip_Flop@lemmy.world · 10 pts · 1y (3 replies)

"Negative Fifteen" and "Negative Seventeen" also work in the same way

RandomVideos@programming.dev · 6 pts · 1y (1 reply)

But negative fifteen has 15 letters, not -15

neetfif evitagen has -15 letters, but i dont think its a number

tgrowl@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 1y

Excellent

Noel_Skum@sh.itjust.works · 4 pts · 1y

Nice. I like.

jrs100000@lemmy.world · 27 pts · 1y (1 reply)

The number one hundred million sixty six thousand five hundred seventy three has exactly 100,066,537 letters.

Rhynoplaz@lemmy.world · 13 pts · 1y

Wait a minute...

Adderbox76@lemmy.ca · 21 pts · 1y

Flive has flive letters.

Admetus@sopuli.xyz · 18 pts · 1y (2 replies)

How about strokes? 一,二,三 😆

hmmm@sh.itjust.works · 8 pts · 1y (1 reply)

Sorry but whenever I see this symbols only thing I can think of CFT(d-orbital splitting). Because one time I asked my friend about CFT he used this symbols.

sga@lemmings.world · 2 pts · 1y

was not expecting cft

Rivalarrival@lemmy.today · 15 pts · 1y

The fifth letter of "fifth" completes the word.

wesker@lemmy.sdf.org · 14 pts · 1y (1 reply)

To

Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 1y

Dammit, I was going to do that one....

muntedcrocodile@lemm.ee · 14 pts · 1y (1 reply)

Remind me of the classic sequence where every number leads to 4.

10 -> 3 -> 5 -> 4

1024 -> 21 -> 9 -> 4

Admetus@sopuli.xyz · 3 pts · 1y

Oh! Now I understand what that other commenter was talking about by 'matching of letters to the numbers' or something along those lines.

Omgboom@lemmy.zip · 13 pts · 1y

Three

harryprayiv@infosec.pub · 13 pts · 1y (1 reply)

sephene

davidgro@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 1y

Whatever that is, I'd assume it's a bad idea to drink it.

heavyboots@lemmy.ml · 12 pts · 1y

No, but cinco has 5, lol.

JustAnotherKay@lemmy.world · 12 pts · 1y (2 replies)

No. As a matter of fact, this is a neat party trick I used to use.

Start with literally any number, and count the letters to match it. You will always end up at four because it's the only English word and Arabic numeral represented with equivalent letters.

yournamehere@lemm.ee · 8 pts · 1y (1 reply)

"party'"

hmmm

JustAnotherKay@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 1y

Okay, it was my neat math class trick. I was a lame nerd, you caught me... My calculus teacher thought it was cool okay??? Lol

pauldrye@lemm.ee · 12 pts · 1y

It's the only one in English unless you allow things like "The absolute value of -20".

xylogx@lemmy.world · 11 pts · 1y

The answer to your question is zero yet at this he same time zero is not an answer to your question.

AdamEatsAss@lemmy.world · 8 pts · 1y

Stand up maths did a video on this 8 years ago. https://youtu.be/LYKn0yUTIU4?si=1Q_9DCt2Eo6aoVpL

ivanafterall@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 1y

I think the answer is no. It would only be possible with very small numbers. Even by the time you've reached 100, it's not going to happen again.

miss_demeanour@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 4 pts · 1y

Nien.

JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 1y

ITT: lots of people who misunderstood a clever but badly-phrased question.

AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 1y

Ten and a hal^f^

Greg@lemmy.ca · 2 pts · 1y

1

MidsizedSedan@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 1y

~~I hate sharing YouTube links, but Matt Parker has a video on this ~~

(Can go all in on Open software with Linux, Firefox and Lemmy, but atill locked into YouTube)

I was too late

lipilee@feddit.nl · 1 pts · 1y

Fri

robocall@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 1y

EEightee

db2@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 1y

All of them except one, two, six and ten have 4 letters. Most have more than that, but they also have 4. 😁

PlaidBaron@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 1y

1

intensely_human@lemm.ee · 1 pts · 1y

“1”