1 in Roman Numerals

1 in Roman numerals at a glance

Roman numeral

I

Lowercase

i

Letters

1

Parts

I

Subtractive pairs

None

In words

one

Latin name

unus

How I is built

Roman numerals are written one decimal place at a time, from the largest place to the smallest. Converting each digit of 1 separately and joining the pieces gives I:

Reading it back, left to right:

• I = 1 → running total 1

The rules I follows

• Largest to smallest. I uses only the symbol I (1 character in all), and the values never increase from left to right except inside a subtractive pair.
• No subtraction needed. None of the digits of 1 is a 4 or a 9, so I is purely additive: just add the symbol values.
• No repeats. Every symbol in I appears once in a row, which is why the numeral stays short.

Where you will see I

• Clock and watch faces. I marks the 1 o’clock position.
• The U.S. Constitution. Amendments are often cited in Roman numerals: Amendment I protects freedom of religion, speech, the press, assembly and petition (part of the Bill of Rights, ratified in 1791).
• The modern Summer Games. They are officially numbered by Olympiad; the Games of the I Olympiad belong to 1896: Athens.
• Championship games. Pro football numbers its championship game with Roman numerals, starting from game I in January 1967. Game I was played in early 1967.
• A single character. Unicode has a dedicated symbol for I: Ⅰ (U+2160), mainly so East Asian text can set the numeral in one character cell. For ordinary writing, use the plain letters.
• Lists and outlines. Book chapters, acts of a play, outline headings and the preface pages of many books (in lowercase: i) are numbered this way.

Numbers near 1 in Roman numerals

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