Roman Numerals Converter - Online Numbers/Date/Year Translator (2024)

Roman numeration uses 7 letters corresponding to 7 numbers. Roman digits chart from 1 to 1000:

Beyond several thousands, there are no letters to represent these numbers.

However, some archaic scripts (more rare) used 4 other symbols

Roman numeral system uses two rules:

— (1) Any letter $ L_2 $ placed to the right of another letter $ L_1 $ are added if $ L_2 \leq L_1 $

Example: VI = 5 + 1 = 6
XX = 10 + 10 = 20

— (2) Any letter of unit $ L_1 = \rm{I} $ placed immediately to the left of another letter $ L_2 \neq \rm{I} $ is subtracted.

Example: IV = 5 - 1 = 4
IX = 10 - 1 = 9
IL = 50 - 1 = 49
IC = 100 - 1 = 99
ID = 500 - 1 = 499

Rule (2) is sometimes extended to: Any letter $ L_1 $ placed immediately to the left of another letter $ L_2 > L_1 $ is subtracted.

Example: XC = 100 - 10 = 90

In theory therefore, any symbol (letter) is repeated a maximum of 3 times consecutively.

The program automatically detects whether the number is in Arabic or Roman numerals and makes the conversion/translation.

Roman numeration does not permit writing large numbers, beyond 9999 the program will display the number of thousands separately. This writing is not standardized but remains comprehensible.

The program is very permissive and allows badly formed Roman numbers not complying with the rule (2).

Example: IVX is translated as 6

Romans did not use the zero, for them it was not a digit but a state of emptiness, so they did not write it (the absence of a number indicates zero).

dCode writes either ??, or 0.

There is no specific way to write a date (or a birthdate), except to write the number of the day, the month and the year separately.

Example: 12 / 06 / 2008 = XII / VI / MMVIII

dCode has a tool to write a date in latin.

In some European countries, the centuries are sometimes written in Roman numerals.

Numbers above 10000 were not thinkable, without any calculation tool, they were useless. If you wish to write a value of hundreds of thousands, one can imagine writing hundreds of M at the beginning of the number.

Example: 9999 = MMMMMMMMMCMXCIX (a bit ridiculous)

The negative writing is not recognized, it probably did not exist. The notion of positive or negative numbers is related to the concept of zero (which was not known to the Romans).

However, today, adding a - can help to be understood.

Example: -XXV = -25

Roman numerals have been added to the Unicode standard, they encode by a single character each number from 1 to 12 (used in clocks and watches) and 8 other numbers meaning:

Roman numerals can be written with 4 identical letters in a row, but this is rare or incorrect.

Example: 4000 can be written MMMM or the watchmaker's four is written IIII