- Tally marks
Tally marks are an implementation of the
unary numeral system . They are a form ofnumeral used forcounting . They allow updating written intermediate results without erasing or discarding anything written down. However, because of the length of large numbers, tallies are not commonly used for static text.In
Europe andNorth America , tally marks are most commonly written as groups of five lines. The first four lines are vertical, and every fifth line runs diagonally or horizontally across the previous four vertical lines, in either of the two possible directions (the popular direction may vary from region to region). The resulting mark is known as a five-bar gate, from its similarity to the same. In some variants, the tenth tally is indicated by an X through the previous four rather than just a line. Two groups of five lines (i.e. ten tally marks) are sometimes circled.Chinese,
Korea n andJapan ese tally marks use the five strokes of which is the character meaning "correct" "proper" and "honesty".Notched sticks, known as
tally sticks also were used for this purpose. The burning of discarded tally sticks resulted in the accidentalBurning of Parliament in London in 1834.Roman numerals and Chinese rod numerals were derived from tally marks, as possibly was theogham script.See also
*
Quipu
*Finger-counting
*Hangman (game) References
*Hsieh, Hui-Kuang (1981) "Chinese tally mark", "The American Statistician", 35 (3), p. 174, doi|10.2307/2683999
External links
* [http://www.plainmath.net/index.php?page=counting A history of Counting (Including Tally Marks)-PlainMath.Net]
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