What is the technical name for the 4 straight lines and a slash through them that equals 5?

Answer 1

Sounds like an old type of tally chart or tally marks which are part of the Unary Numeral System.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tally_marks
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unary_numeral_system

Answer 2

You know the song that goes something like "oooh oooh Mr. tally man tally me bananas...I'm tired and I want to go home...." That comes from the banana plantations where the field hands carried bunches of bananas from the trees to the wagon.

And as they threw the bunches into the wagon, the tally man would put a / beside the field hand's name for each bunch. Every fifth slash would be drawn across the four //// to mark five bunches.

Then, at the end of the very long work day in the hot sun, the tally man would add up the groups of five tally slashes and mentally multiply by five and add in the remaining stray //// to determine how many bunches each field hand loaded. I am guessing, but I would guess the field hands were paid by the number of bunches they loaded.

In very early days, before numbers were defined and used, the four //// represented fingers and the cross slash represented the thumb. Thus, one / is one finger, two // indicates two fingers, etc. In other words, each group of five represents a handful (four fingers and a thumb) of tallys.

We see some semblance of the tally slashes in the Roman numerals: I, II, III But they found just slashes awkward and came up with the decrement and increment by position; so that we have IIII = IV where V = IIIII = (IIII), the handful of five. Thus, VI = (IIII) + I = IIIIII where I used (IIII) to indicate the group of five tallys because Answers doesn't do cross slashes.

Answer 3

A block of 5 tally marks

Answer 4

Old West Jailhouse Notation, also known as Desperado Algebra.

Sorry, I couldn't resist. :)

Answer 5

One technical name for this is "hash mark numeration" though I usually hear them referred to as "hash marks."

Answer 6

4 parallel lines cut by a transversal

Answer 7

I agree with the first entry.

Sorry I upset you so much, I really didn't mean like that. Please don't reply to my questions if you are going to have that attitude. Again I am really sorry, that must have come off mean, and i really didn't mean it like that.

Answer 8

good question! I call them tally marks.