Roman numbers Roman numerals are still used occasionally. The BBC, for example, uses them to show the year its programmes were made in. The Romans used letters for numbers. I is one. To stop the numbers becoming very long they used other letters for some larger numbers and made the numbers between the letters by taking letters away or adding them.
V is five.
The Romans used I for one, V for 5, X for ten, L for 50, C for 100, D for 500 and M for a thousand. XIV is 24. If you have tried to understand the dates of BBC productions, you will know that most Roman numbers take time to decipher. The M is 1,000, to this is added CM for 900, then XC for 90, then VII for seven. The difficulty gets much worse if you want to do arithmetic in Roman numerals.