899: Greek Numerals May 25, 2017

In many countries people write numbers using Arabic numerals, though these are poorly named as they come from India, and in the Middle East today very few of their numerals look the same; e.g. 2, 3, and 4 appear as ٢,٣, and ٤ respectively. There are many more systems of writing numbers out there, but in the West there tend to only be two used commonly, including the Arabic numerals of course, and Roman numerals. The latter use letters—I, V, X, L, C, D, and M—to express numbers, similar to many other systems. The Greek numerals, though less common than their Roman counterpart today, also use alphabetical letters to represent numbers. Some on the Roman system was somewhat arbitrary, such as V and L for fifty when the Latin word for both starts with a Q, but Greek numerals represented 1-10 with the first ten letters of their alphabet, and 20-90 (going up by tens) is represented by the 11th through 18th letter, and hundreds are represented by the 19th through 27th letter (including the archaic sampi).