10 in Roman Numerals

10 in Roman numerals at a glance

Roman numeral

X

Lowercase

x

Letters

1

Parts

X

Subtractive pairs

None

In words

ten

Latin name

decem

How X is built

Roman numerals are written one decimal place at a time, from the largest place to the smallest. Converting each digit of 10 separately and joining the pieces gives X:

Reading it back, left to right:

• X = 10 → running total 10

The rules X follows

• Largest to smallest. X uses only the symbol X (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 10 is a 4 or a 9, so X is purely additive: just add the symbol values.
• No repeats. Every symbol in X appears once in a row, which is why the numeral stays short.

Where you will see X

• Clock and watch faces. X marks the 10 o’clock position.
• The U.S. Constitution. Amendments are often cited in Roman numerals: Amendment X reserves powers not given to the federal government to the states or the people (part of the Bill of Rights, ratified in 1791).
• The modern Summer Games. They are officially numbered by Olympiad; the Games of the X Olympiad belong to 1932: Los Angeles.
• Championship games. Pro football numbers its championship game with Roman numerals, starting from game I in January 1967. Game X was played in early 1976.
• A single character. Unicode has a dedicated symbol for X: Ⅹ (U+2169), 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: x) are numbered this way.

Numbers near 10 in Roman numerals

Need a different value? Use the Roman numeral converter, or browse the Roman numerals chart.