If you have a group of people banding together to fight evil, or to cause it, then it's good to have a good team name that people will remember. If you can't think of anything else, then why not name yourself after the number of members you have, plus a nice adjective that describes you? Maybe try to tie it together in a pun, some Added Alliterative Appeal or something.
In the end, what do you have? Why, The Notable Numeral, of course!
This naming convention is popular in Real Life to describe people who make the news as a group, usually as either the victims of a crime or as the people arrested for a crime (often in historic/sensational cases of people who are believed to be wrongly accused, whose case seems to represent a broader issue or who grab the public's attention in some other way), such as the Buffalo Six and the West Memphis Three. The Other Wiki calls these "Quantified groups of defendants." Describing a single such defendant, usually fictional, as the something-or-other One is a Stock Parody.
This can get awkward when you have a change in membership (unless the net change is zero). When changing the name would be very difficult, you'll just have to live with the name being an Artifact Name due to the One Extra Member (or one less member, as the case may be).
Beware, if excess alliteration disturbs you, then it might be best to look elsewhere.
See also The Adjectival Superhero, where the adjective describes a person or team instead of a number — teams where the number specifies how many elements a plural noun has (for example, The Three Musketeers) more properly go under that trope. Can cross with Superhero Sobriquets if it's a nickname and not the team's proper name.
Examples (Numerically Ordered For Your Convenience):
- My Hero, Zero
- The Chosen One
- The theme song for Motu Patlu refers to the eponymous duo as "Motu aur Patlu ki jodi" ("the awesome twosome, Motu and Patlu").
- The Dynamic Duo
- The Dynamite Duo from "Dynamite Magazine"
- The Ambiguously Gay Duo.
- The Gruesome Twosome
- The Dirty Pair
- The Odd Couple
- The Onibaku Duo
- Those Two Guys
- Akumaizer 3
- The Amazing Three
- Kishou Sentai Weather Three
- The Power Trio
- The Freudian Trio
- The Terrible Trio, and namesake trope
- The "Untouchable Trio" (plus one) of the Knights of the Dinner Table.
- The Warriors Three
- The F4
- The Awesome Foursome
- The Big Four
- Simple Samosa's main characters are collectively called the "Chatpata Four" ("chatpata" means "spicy" in Hindi) in one of Hotstar's official episode descriptions.
- The Elite Four (a.k.a. The Shitennō, which translates to Four Heavenly Kings.)
- The Fab Four
- College basketball's Final Four.
- "The Fearsome Foursome!"
- Fantastic Four
- The Frightful Four, a group of Fantastic Four villains.
- The Four, the Alternate Company Equivalent and Evil Counterpart Fantastic Four from Planetary.
- Genius 4
- Marginal #4
- In Yamucha's-Kung Fu Academy, the squid gang are collectively referred to as the Mountain Thieves F4, with the "4" referring to how there are four of them.
- The Pre-Fab Four
- The other Prefab Four
- The Civic-Minded Five
- In sports, Michigan basketball's Fab Five.
- The Famous Five. Who were a bunch of Canadian feminist icons; sadly, they aren't that famous.
- The Famous Five and The Secret Seven, child detectives in two series by Enid Blyton.
- The Fatal Five.
- Teen Titans: The Fearsome Five
- Teen Titans (2003): The H.I.V.E. Five, the animated version of the Fearsome Five.
- Darkwing Duck: The Fearsome Five.
- Paper Mario 64: The Fearsome 5.
- The Fearless Five
- The Fiendish Five
- The "Final Five" and "Significant Seven" Cylons.
- Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five
- Kung Fu Panda: The Furious Five
- The Jackson Five (or 5ive?)
- Also from pop music, The Dave Clark Five.
- Dynamo5
- Dai Sentai Goggle Five, Chikyuu Sentai Fiveman, Rescue Sentai GoGoFive and Uchuu Sentai Kyuranger (Kyu means 9, but the team ends up with 12 members by the end)
- Is there another team of five we should know about? Say, one that blends these series' Sentai sensibilities with the Magical Girl genre?
- Pulp Fiction: Fox Force Five, the main characters of an in-universe failed television pilot of the same name.
Mia: Fox as in we're a bunch of foxy chicks. Force as in we're a force to be reckoned with. Five as there's one, two, three, four, five of us.
- EarthBound (1994): The Runaway Five (which apparently actually contains six people)
- Inferior Five, a humorous DC Comics superteam consisting of the offspring of more popular, powerful supers.
- The Dark Five.
- The Battleship Five Quartet. Parodied, along with everything else under the sun in that series, by virtue of having six members. This fact perplexes their leader so much he fires them all.
- Big Hero 6
- The Bionic Six.
- The Mane Six.
- The Oceanic Six
- The Original Six (NHL hockey teams).
- The Sarajevo Six - formerly a squad of mercenaries who fought in The Yugoslav Wars, presently a bunch of fugitive war criminals.
- The Savage Six.
- The Secret Six from DC Comics.
- Spider-Man: The Sinister Six
- The Splendid Six in "Clubland Heroes". It's mentioned in the backstory that they were the Good Fellows Four before recruiting two new members; at the end of the story, there's a summary of how the various members moved on from the team, during which it becomes the Splendix Five, then the Splendid Three, before the remaining members give up and officially disband.
- The Super 6.
- The Deep Six.
- Blake's 7.
- The Sinister Seven from Mission: Impossible (Konami). Subverted, since it's never said who they really are.
- The Greendale Seven
- Kami 7 (Seven Goddesses)
- The eponymous Killer7.
- Koi Koi 7 (though there are only six of them)
- The Magnificent Seven.
- The Return of the Secaucus 7 (1980, John Sayles)
- The Super 7 (though they're rarely called that In-Universe, inseatd opting to go by "The Super Sensors" or "The Super Borys").
- DV8 — in-universe they're called the Deviants, which is much more appropriate since it's rare for all 8 members to be active at once. "DV8" was probably just easier to trademark when it came time for them to get their own comic.
- The 8 Gang. It was a global criminal enterprise with many members, but broken up into 8 sub-gangs that each got their own story arc as Mandrake defeated them one by one over a period of years.
- The Hateful Eight.
- The Rabid Eight.
- The Slaughterhouse Nine, a team of psychopaths who later get way more than Nine members.
- The Ehcatl Nine, so named because it sounded better than "Ehcatl Twenty-Or-So"
- The Nine Divines of Tamriel, nine (originally eight, later joined by a Deity of Human Origin) divine beings who sacrificed portions of themselves to create the mortal world. Phrases like "By the Nine" are used like "Oh my god".
- The Great Ten, a China-based team of DC super heroes.
- The Terrible Ten, a series of short films in the 1940's and 50's.
- The Tōtsuki Elite Ten Council.
- The Big Ten, currently with 14 members and 2 "affiliates" (schools that only compete in the conference in 1 or 2 sports).
- The NCAA basketball conference The Atlantic 10, also currently with 14 members and 2 "affiliates" (schools that only compete in the conference in 1 or 2 sports).
- The Eleven Supernovas
- Ocean's Eleven, Twelve, Thirteen and Eight.
- Combat Kelly and his Deadly Dozen
- The Dirty Dozen.
- Majestic 12.
- The Big 12, currently with 10 members and 11 "affiliates" (schools that only compete in the conference in 1 or 2 sports).
- The Pac 12, currently with 12 members and 4 "affiliates" (schools that only compete in the conference in 1 or 2 sports). (As noted above, membership changes can make this trope very awkward.)
- Organization XIII
- The eponymous band of pirates in Jim Button and the Wild 13. They were actually never more than twelve, they just epically fail at math.
- The NCAA March Madness college basketball brackets: Sweet Sixteen, Elite Eight, and Final Four.
- For an example of the trope applied to victims of crime, Being Human has the "Box Tunnel 20"
- The Forty Thieves.
- AKB48 was originally planned to have three teams, each made up of sixteen members.
- The Crazy 88. Probably a subversion, since there aren't 88 of them. They just thought it sounded cool.
- The Wonderful 101. The team in the game is actually called the "Wonderful 100" (with 100 pronounced as "one-double-oh")- the trailer stated that the extra 1 represented the player, but at the end of the game the team gains a new member and officially becomes the "Wonderful 101".
- The 108 Righteous Bandits of Water Margin — 108 being a number of major mystical significance throughout many eastern religions.
- A Chinese gang in Deadlands is called the 108 Righteous Bandits. There aren't exactly 108 of them, they just thought the name was cool enough to appropriate.