this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2025
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We used to. It's called a dozen
That's not really base 12, it's just a special name for the decimal number 12.
It is now, but it used to be part of a base 12 system. 12 is a dozen, a dozen dozen is a gross, and dozen gross is a great gross.
There was some rough times as it switched to decimal and you wind up with bullshit like the 'long hundred' being 10 dozen and a short hundred being 10 tens.
Fair enough.
I was going to bemoan not having a special character for 11 and 12 but I guess people weren't writing things down so much in the 1500's and maybe there were characters for those numbers.
I wonder if that's why we name 11 eleven and 12 twelve rather than firsteen and seconteen.
Nah, eleven and twelve not having a -teen suffix is because English doesn't have any standards and steals language randomly. Both are germanic in origin, but different time periods. Eleven and twelve come from a 12th century system of counting on your fingers (twelve basically means 'two left' after you count to ten), and -teen is from a 14th century math perspective (thirteen basically means 'ten more than three').
It really is like that. Some people used to count with their fingers differently than we do now. They counted with the thumb on one hand, with each finger beginning (i.e. where the finger is connected to the hand) and each knuckle having a value. In total, with four fingers you get 4x3=12, which is where the expression ‘a dozen’ comes from. The other hand was used to count how many times you did this; strangely enough, with the fingers as we know them. So you could count up to 60.
At least that's how I learnt it at some point. If anyone has more information on this, please let us know!
Incidentally, I find the binary counting method with the fingers more interesting, where you can count up to 1023 with ten fingers.
Dozens, but not tens of something. I like English.
you can say tens of something, i don't see an issue with that grammatically speaking.
"tens of thousands" literally derives from that phrasing even. similar to other weird anomalies like "ten hundred" which likely comes from "ten hundreds" for example
Technically speaking, any sort of arbitrarily defined grouping used in any numeral system can be used like this. For example 2^n would be relevant when discussing binary counting. You might refer to binary number groups as powers as a result.
Huh, that actually makes some sense. How would it be written, I guess spoken you could easily go "eleven dozen and seven", presumably you would need another symbol for 10/11. Write it as B7 if you wanted to use A/B similar to how you would use A-F with hexadecimal.
Probably take some time to get used to it from being used to using decimal.
probably the way we used to do it before we got arabic numerals, with knuckle counts and long hundreds
The "eleven dozen and seven" is functionally no different from "One hundred and thirty-nine." We'd just have 2 more characters than we do now.
We even have a name for a third digit in base-12. 12 dozen is a "gross".
The Babylonians used base 60, which is neat because it cleanly divides by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, and 30, whereas base 10 has just 2 and 5.
Yeah but who's got the taller tower?? Checkmate Babylonians
it depends on whether or not "eleven" would be base ten 11, or base 12 eleven.