Blake Schwendiman's Blog and Blook

Last night my wife asked me to explain to our daughter why Abraham Lincoln started his famous address with the words "Four score and seven years ago..." I was stumped. I understand the numbers four score and seven to mean 87, but I don't know why he chose that wording. So that's the question for our armchair historians.

I've always assumed that the wording was chosen artistically -- to present a more formal flair to the beginning of his speech. It sounds more poetic or artistic than simply saying "Eighty-seven years ago..." But I'm not sure that this wasn't simply a choice that was more common at the time. Perhaps the word "score" was a commonly-used word at the time in the same sense that fortnight, peck or rod were common in the past but almost never used today.

So that's the real question: why did Lincoln say "Four score and seven"?

I find these kinds of things very interesting, so I'm going to throw a little trivia out. Did you know that in French the way to express the number eighty is to say quatre vingt which is literally four twenties (four score)? And the number ninety is quatre vingt dix, literally four twenties ten? Did you know that not all cultures group numbers by thousands? In China and commonly in India numbers are grouped by ten thousands. For example the number one million in English is written 1,000,000 in the US, but would be represented as 100,0000 or 百萬(100)(1,0000). In many languages constructing large numbers is much more challenging than in English. In Xhosa and Zulu, the year 1987 which we would say as nineteen eighty-seven would be spoken as one thousand nine hundreds eight tens seven. In many cases native Xhosa and Zulu speakers today would switch to English for large numbers.