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10

Natural number

10 (ten) is the natural number following 9 and preceding 11. Ten is the base of decimal numeral systems, the most common systems for denoting numbers in both spoken and written language.

The English name for the number "ten" originates from the Proto-Germanic root *tehun, which in turn comes from the Proto-Indo-European root *déḱm̥. This root is the source of similar words for "ten" in many other Germanic languages. The widespread use of decimal systems is believed to be because humans have ten fingers and ten toes, which people may have used to count by.

01Linguistics

  • A collection of ten items (most often ten years) is called a decade.
  • The ordinal form is tenth. The adjectives decimal and denary refer to systems or quantities based on ten. * Increasing a quantity by one order of magnitude is most widely understood to mean multiplying the quantity by ten.
  • To reduce something by one tenth is to decimate. (In ancient Rome, the killing of one in ten soldiers in a cohort was the punishment for cowardice or mutiny; or, one-tenth of the able-bodied men in a village as a form of retribution, thus causing a labor shortage and threat of starvation in agrarian societies.)
The tetractys
The tetractys

02Mathematics

As the base of the decimal numeral system, powers of ten are used to express orders of magnitude and form the basis of common scientific notation.

10=1+2+3+4={\binom {5}{2}}={\binom {5}{3}}.

This representation underlies the tetractys, a triangular figure of ten points important in Pythagoreanism.
  • A ten sided polygon is called a decagon.

List of basic calculations

Multiplication 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 20 25 50 100 1000
10 × x 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 110 120 130 140 150 160 200 250 500 1000 10000
Division 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15
10 ÷ x 10 5 3.3 2.5 2 1.6 1.428571 1.25 1.1 1 0.90 0.83 0.769230 0.714285 0.6
x ÷ 10 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9 1 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5
Exponentiation 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
10x 10 100 1000 10000 100000 1000000 10000000 100000000 1000000000 10000000000
x10 1 1024 59049 1048576 9765625 60466176 282475249 1073741824 3486784401 10000000000
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Sources and credits

This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article 10, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.

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