Roman numerals are, by modern standards, a bit unusual. By virtue of using designations for both 5 and 10, and not scaling well to higher numbers, they’ve fallen out of favor outside of some … ...

Roman numerals, unsurprisingly, date back to ancient Rome, and while they’re no longer commonplace, they do still occur outside of the Super Bowl use case: they sometimes appear on clock faces, or ...

The church’s front gable is adorned with an elegant, Roman-numeral clock dial. Passersby might not realize it, but the clockworks moving the hands was made by a Connecticut legend, Eli Terry.

Most of the numbers are easy — either IIII or IV is correct as the Roman numeral representing 4.Clock face makers working before 1850 almost always used the IIII form.

That tradition will change in 2016 with the NFL announcing plans to break the Roman numeral streak for Super Bowl 50. The hiatus will only last one season, however, with Super Bowl LI on tap for 2017.

For one year, the NFL is using regular numbers instead of the numbers that some dead people used 2,000 years ago. But this is the one year it would've been easy to use Roman numerals!

Roman numerals are a numeral system which was used in Ancient Rome. It uses letters instead of numbers to represent values. You may have seen Roman numerals on clocks and on TV or film credits.