Roman Numerals

For daily use we use the Arabic system.But the numeral system that the Romans used are still being used,though not as often.Romans had letter symbols that stood for their numbers. We use their system still today. You may notice them on clocks,buildings and other objects. The kind of Roman numerals that we used are different than what the first Romans.Somewhere in time it was changed by someone or someones to be simpiler for us. The early Romans would write, 4 as IIII instead of how we write 4, as IV.And ancient Romans wrote 9 as VIIII,whereas we write IX as 9.

Roman numerals are printed as lower case letters in medieval books and books of earlier print. Instead of having v's they used u's. If you had the number VIII,this is what it might look like in those books, uiij. The printers used lower case j for the last numeral of a number.

Some numbers have different rules appleied.IV and IX are examples of the Romans subtrative princapal. The first number, I is smaller than the second,V. You subtract I (1)from V (5) getting 4.So IV is 4. in IX you subtract I (1) from X (10) which equals 9.See? Numbers that have their first letter smaller than then the second letter need to have their first letter subtracted from the second number. Even big numbers like 90 have this rule.