At least the World will end, an event anticipated with great joy by many. It will end very soon, but not in the year 2000, which has come and gone. From that I conclude that God Almighty is not heavily into Numerology.
Kurt Vonnegut, Hocus Pocus
Since mankind began to count, they've wanted to assign importance to numbers. This might be due to the desire to assign significance to everything. This might be to make it easier to have common threads in stories. Maybe it's just
to look cool.
Regardless of reason, numbers are often given significance in stories, and mention of a number in a story can indicate a meaning beyond just counting out items. Here are some of the more common motifs.
Zero - This number represents The Void, the complete absence of being. It's usually something menacing, and it's always a bad moment when there's nothing left. Characters named after the number Zero form the trope
My Hero Zero — though they're as likely to be villainous.
One - This is the number for
The Hero, and it represents his standing alone as the best. One also represents the beginning, and the primal source of power. This is why a hero will succeed if there's only
One Buwwet Weft or a
Million To One Chance - One is just that
powerful.
Two - Two represents duality - and thus, it stands in for The Villain. Sometimes, it's rather blatant (such as Two-Face in Batman), but other times it's more subtle. Two is the prime source of moments where the villain says that he and the hero are
Not So Different. Also, because two identical people represent the loss of individuality, Two also pops up as
Creepy Twins. Internally, a hero divided in two may have any number of varieties of an
Enemy Within.
Three - Three is the most basic way to represent a structure, in a triangle, so it has representations of power. This is the origin of tropes such as the
Rule Of Three, the
Power Trio,
The Hecate Sisters and
The Three Faces Of Eve.
Christianity believes that
God originated this, having always been Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
A basic theme in
Blue Man Group is that three is the fewest number of people needed to have an alienation or unpopularity. In most voting political systems, getting this also comes into play (majority is 2 out of every 3 votes). Otherwise known as two is company, three is a crowd.
Four - Four actually has different meanings in different parts of the world. In European traditions, four represented the physical world, and the four elements that made up everything (fire, water, earth, and air). They also corresponded with the four cardinal directions (north, south, east, and west), and thus represent a grounding in reality and are generally positive. Classically-based
Elemental Powers use this pattern. See also
Four Temperament Ensemble.
However, in Asian traditions, the number sounds almost like the word for "death" in all languages that borrow from Chinese, which arises in the trope
Four Is Death. Curiously, the one aversion are
The Four Gods, although they frequently are depicted as rather dangerous (and at least one is frequently depicted as explicitly evil, like Seiryu in
Fushigi Yuugi).
Five - Also distinct in both Eastern and Western traditions, although not as radically different as they are with four. In the Asian tradition, the physical world was tied with five, and they classically had a five-pronged elemental system (adding wood and metal to the four Europeans used while removing air). The relationship between them was much more complex, as was the
Elemental Rock Paper Scissors associated with them. This balance directly led to the formation of
Five Man Bands.
In Europe, five also represented a fifth element, but there it represented Ether, or Quintessence, the mystical substance which made up spirits and the like. It thus represented the esoteric and the spiritual plane, and was considered completely detached from the physical realm. This is most obvious in pentagrams. Some people holding to the idea of
four distinct personality types also hold the idea of a fifth type, balanced between the extremes of the four. It either has all their strengths (superior, above), none of their strengths or weaknesses (equal, between), or none of their strengths (inferior, empty). In some Japanese systems including that of Musashi's
Book of Five Rings, the fifth element is void, with associations similar to Western quintessence but a strong Zen flavor.
Six - Most of six's meanings have been swallowed by the fact that the number
six-hundred sixty-six was supposed to be the
Number Of The Beast, though that ignores the more scholarly theory that
The Bible's Book of Revelation is a thinly-veiled political
Take That at Rome and those Christans who integrate into pagan society, and that said Beast is generally agreed to be Nero (or possibly Caligula). Furthermore it was a numerical value of six hundred and sixty six that designated the Beast, not simply the Arabic digit '6' appearing three times, it's given as six, three score and six (a score being twenty) (so all those people who are afraid of babies born on June 6th 2006, please stop being silly). Still, the imagery at this point invariably depicts six as a negative number, and only evil characters attach themselves to it. Six is considered evil in the Bible because it falls short of seven, the perfect number.
This is taken even further in German, where it is pronounced very similar to sex (as in intercourse), also adding a dirty connotation (and source for double entendres). In Swedish the two words are pronounced and indeed spelled the same, leading to many a juvenile joke.
Interestingly enough, 666 is considered a good number in Chinese culture. For example, on June 6th 2006, there were many Chinese marriages, whereas most Westerners would try to avoid this.
Seven - Seven is the most popular lucky number, and was originally the number of the holy virtues man was said to have. Of course,
their opposites are much more memorable, but seven is still overall a positive force, to the point that days of the week are still numbered in seven. Dante's Paradiso exemplified this best, with seven layers of heaven. Of course, biblically, seven can also be the number of finality: the seven hills of Rome, the seven angels and the seven seals, etc. In Japanese culture this manifests in
The Seven Mysteries. Also, in the Japanese language,
Seven Is Nana. See also
Magnificent Seven, the Ensemble that falls under this number.
In Christianity (and in Judaism before it), seven is the number of perfection, and thus the number of God.
For songwriters, "seven" is a convenient rhyme for "heaven", and is also useful because it scans as two syllables.
Plot Coupons also have a tendency to come in sevens, especially in
Video Games.
Seven also comes up as a limit on human minds - people are said to be able to remember only seven different numbers in a single trial. Similarly, the Incident Command System for dealing with emergencies forbids each person from giving direct orders to more than seven people.
Eight - Eight typically has notions of the hidden and esoteric, in part because it looks like an infinity symbol on its side (which was
lampshaded on
The Tick). It doesn't come up much, but expect plenty of mysteries when it does.
Eight is also the luckiest of lucky numbers if you are Chinese, so an office on the eighth floor at number 88 8th Avenue, for instance, would be considered to have excellent Feng Shui no matter how the furniture was arranged.
Conversely, on
Discworld, eight is the number of Bel-Shammaroth and hence dreaded. Wizards don't like to say it aloud. It also symbolizes the eighth color, which only appears during spell effects, and thus it has magical significance.
Some National Socialists use the number 88 as a code for the phrase "Heil Hitler", H being the eighth letter of the alphabet. A further group call themselves
Combat 18, 18 here standing for AH, Adolf Hitler (not any other phrase with the initials AH that you might think applies to swastika-tattooed, racist thugs). The irony of their using 18, used to represent life by Jews thanks to the Hebrew word
chai and Jewish numerology, is
probably definitely lost on them.
Eight is also an important number atomically, as any given valence shell can only contain 8 electrons. Positively and negatively charged ions bond to other ions to reach 8 electrons between them. Until you get past the first three rows of the periodic table. Something similar holds in nuclear physics, which is why oxygen (with eight protons and eight neutrons) is one of the most stable and therefore common elements.
Eight also has both 2 and 4 as factors, so it's convenient for combining pairs of things with quadruplets of things—such as between the two Golden Sun games, how the two games together have two characters representing each of four elements.
Nine - Nine is the apex of the single digits, and thus the apex of worldly power. Appearances of this are usually sources of great power, since it's essentially a trio of
Power Trios. Very big in
Norse Mythology, which may be why Tolkien, fan of the Vikings that he was, made
nine Ringwraiths (and nine Walkers). Also, there are nine orders of angels in Judaeo-Christian theology.
Ten - Since most people are born with ten fingers (which are the basis for beginning to count), ten is a comfortable number to express, either via powers of it or the number itself. It's extraordinarily popular for grouping, to the point that people will try to make things fit into a group of ten whether or not they'll fit. The entire Arabic numeral system (the one most Westerners use, because it's better than the Roman system) is based entirely on the number ten, as is the metric system. Tropes spawned of this shoehorning include
Exty Years From Now. In certain numerologies, ten is also used as shorthand for 'lots'.
Twelve - 1, 2, 3, 4, and 6 are all factors of this number, making it an early highly composite number. It symbolizes completeness as a result, and is easy to divide into smaller groups. It also has heavy mystic implications—for example, the twelve signs of the zodiac (Western and Eastern alike).
Big in
The Bible. Twelve tribes of Israel, twelve apostles, twelve days of
Christmas (close enough), etc. This may have something to do with three (the Trinity) being multiplied by four (the four corners of creation). See Thirteen for further examples.
Thirteen - The number of full moons in a year, the number of people seated at the Last Supper, the traditional number of witches or Satanists in a coven, the age at which someone officially becomes a
teenager etc. Bad medicine. Often not assigned to a house (it will be numbered 11A or 12A depending on the numbering system) or to a floor in a tower.
The Eighties' Eagle comic strip
The Thirteenth Floor featured a Holodeck run by the building's A.I. occupying the unlucky floor, seeing as how nobody wanted to live there. Also used to suggest certain words beginning with the letter M (the 13th letter of the alphabet).
Thirteen has a long history of being unlucky; the Greek pantheon kicked out Hestia, goddess of the hearth, to make room for Dionysus, god of wine, in their circle of twelve; it was believed back then that having a thirteenth deity in the highest echelons of the pantheon would lead to ruin, and that alcohol was much more important on the sacred scale than the home. Judas Iscariot, the thirteenth attendee at the Last Supper, was the one who betrayed
Jesus, and it was believed that Jesus's crucifixion happened on Friday the 13th — or if
The Da Vinci Code is accurate,
The Purge of the original
Knight Templar occurred on that date. There is evidence of other cultures developing forms of triskaidekaphobia before even that.
There were also thirteen states at the time of the US Declaration of Independence, as commemorated by the thirteen stripes on the flag. The $1 bill has several references to the number thirteen: thirteen stripes on a shield, thirteen stars, a branch with thirteen leaves and thirteen berries, a sheaf of thirteen arrows, and the phrase "E Pluribus Unum" which contains thirteen letters. (The fact that 13 constantly crops up in American symbolism has led numerous conspiracy loons to theories of ever-increasing inanity. They always over look the simple explanation of thirteen states.)
- Scott Lynch's novel The Lies of Locke Lamora plays with this trope. The city of Camorr has twelve official gods, and a nameless thirteenth god worshiped in secret by thieves and swindlers.
- The old World Of Darkness loved the number thirteen (as do a number of Tabletop RPGs with a defined setting.)
- Don De Lillo's Underworld features characters consciously noticing the number 13 turning up in their lives, demonstrating the paranoid and self-defeating collective mind of the Cold War generation.
Fifteen
Not a lot to say about this one, but it may be worth pointing out that in Japan it is often associated with strawberries. This is because the Japanese word for strawberry, Ichigo, sounds like the way the number is written in arabic numerals (15 = One Five = Ichi Go). Ichigo is also a fairly common name (the most notable Ichigo probably being the main character of
Bleach). Expect characters with this name to have associations with the number, the fruit or both.
Since it is a multiple of both tree & five, it may carry connotations of both those numbers.
One Hundred And Eight - see the entry.
There are other numbers which are said to have some significance either seriously or in jest (seventeen,
twenty-three,
forty-two, and forty-seven are the most prominent).
Prime numbers in general are popular for the number of
Plot Coupons, especially three and seven.
Any work that references numerology in general (or gematria, the Kabbalic study) will heavily reference this trope.
See also
ArcNumbers.
Here are some numbered tropes by number and type.
| Number | Characters | Combat Tropes | Love Tropes | Dramatic Devices |
| 0 | My Hero Zero, Zero Percent Approval Rating | | | |
| 1 | Loners Are Freaks, Only Sane Man | Single Stroke Battle, One Buwwet Weft | Everybody Is Single | Single Issue Psychology, It Only Works Once, Once Is Not Enough, Only One |
| 2 | Those Two Guys, Heterosexual Life Partners | Guns Akimbo, Dual Wielding, Bifurcated Weapon, Double Weapon | Chained Heat, Pair The Spares | Crosses The Line Twice |
| 3 | Power Trio, Comic Trio, Token Trio | Melee A Trois | Love Triangle, Triang Relations | Three Examples And A Name, Three Rules Of Three |
| 4 | Four Temperament Ensemble, Four Girl Ensemble | | Four Is Death, The Four Gods | |
| 5 | Five Man Band, Five Races, Five Token Band | Five Rounds Rapid | Five Stages Of Grief | Five Five Five, Five More Minutes |
| 6 | Sixth Ranger | | | |
| 7 | Magnificent Seven; Seven Is Nana | | | Seven Deadly Sins |
| ∞ | | Infinity Plus One Sword | Love Dodecahedron | One Hundred And Eight, Exty Years From Now , Over Nine Thousand |
