quinary

• The ease with which the simplest arithmetical series may be continued led our fathers quietly to the adoption, first, of the quinary, and second, of the decimal group; and we have continued its use so quietly, that its propriety has rarely been questioned; indeed, most persons are both surprised and offended, when they hear it declared to be a purely artificial base, proper only to abstract numbers The binary base, on the contrary, is natural, real, simple, and accords with the tendency of the mind to simplify, to individualize. —  The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 05, No. 28, February, 1860
• Their system of numeration is quinary, as will appear from the following list 1. —  The Seminole Indians of Florida Fifth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1883-84, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1887, pages 469-532
• The process just indicated may be gone through with at 5, or at 20, thus giving us a quinary or a vigesimal, or, more probably, a mixed system; and, in rare instances, some other number may serve as the point of departure from simple into compound numeral terms. —  The Number Concept Its Origin and Development
• It certainly is not at all rare; and in Australia its influence on spoken number systems is most apparent Any number system which passes the limit 10 is reasonably sure to have either a quinary, a decimal, or a vigesimal structure. —  The Number Concept Its Origin and Development
• Pott remarks[208] that the Bolans, of western Africa, appear to make some use of 6 as their number base, but their system, taken as a whole, is really a quinary-decimal. —  The Number Concept Its Origin and Development

Allen's Synonyms and Antonyms

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