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Finger-counting can serve as a form of manual communication, particularly in marketplace trading – including hand signaling during open outcry in floor trading – and also in hand games, such as morra. Finger-counting is known to go back to ancient Egypt at least, and probably even further back. [Note 1]
Morra is a hand game that dates back thousands of years to ancient Roman and Greek times. Each player simultaneously reveals their hand, extending any number of fingers, and calls out a number. Any player who successfully guesses the total number of fingers revealed by all players combined scores a point.
[3] [4] Finally, there are neurological connections between the parts of the brain that appreciate quantity and the part that "knows" the fingers (finger gnosia), and these suggest that humans are neurologically predisposed to use their hands in counting. [5] [6] While finger-counting is typically not something that preserves archaeologically ...
The Late Roman hand abacus shown here as a reconstruction contains seven longer and seven shorter grooves used for whole number counting, the former having up to four beads in each, and the latter having just one. The rightmost two grooves were for fractional counting. The abacus was made of a metal plate where the beads ran in slots.
Older finger counting methods used the four fingers and the three bones in each finger to count to twelve. [3] Other hand-gesture systems are also in use, for example the Chinese system by which one can count to 10 using only gestures of one hand. With finger binary it is possible to keep a finger count up to 1023 = 2 10 − 1.
One may suspect this is based on an ancient tradition of finger counting. Residues of ancient counting by 20s and 12s are the words "score", "dozen", and "gross". (Larger number words like "million" are not part of the original English system; they are scholarly creations based ultimately on Latin.).
Naughty Grecians likely developed the phallic gesture around 2,500 years ago to offend each other. Here’s how the middle finger became the most obscene digit.
Odds and evens is a simple game of chance and hand game, involving two people simultaneously revealing a number of fingers and winning or losing depending on whether they are odd or even, or alternatively involving one person picking up coins or other small objects and hiding them in their closed hand, while another player guesses whether they have an odd or even number.