The source of 13's bad reputation – “
The number 13 is considered an unlucky number in some countries. The end of the Mayan calendar's 13th Baktun was superstitiously feared as a harbinger of the apocalyptic 2012 phenomenon. Fear of the number 13 has a specifically recognized phobia, triskaidekaphobia, a word first recorded in 1911.
The number 7 is often considered lucky, and it has a definite mystique, perhaps because it is a prime number—that is, it cannot be obtained by multiplying two smaller numbers together.
In many East Asian cultures, including China, Korea, Japan and Taiwan, the number 4 is considered unlucky. If you step onto an elevator, you probably won't see a button indicating the fourth floor because most apartment buildings and hospitals skip the number altogether.
But: FOUR is a lucky number in Europe, North America and Australia. The FOUR-leaf clover is a symbol of luck.
Cricket in Australia holds 87 as a superstitiously unlucky score and is referred to as "the devil's number." This originates from the fact that 87 is 13 runs short of a century. 187, 287 and so on are also considered unlucky but is not as common as 87 on its own.
Traditionally, 4 is unlucky because it is sometimes pronounced shi, which is the word for death. Sometimes levels or rooms with 4 don't exist in hospitals or hotels. Particularly in the maternity section of a hospital, the room number 43 is avoided because it can literally mean "stillbirth".
Seven was the most popular choice for both men and women. The survey revealed some other findings, too.
Like many countries throughout the world, Japan considers the number seven lucky. This is not imported, but steeped in the country's religious traditions.
In number theory, an evil number is a non-negative integer that has an even number of 1s in its binary expansion. These numbers give the positions of the zero values in the Thue–Morse sequence, and for this reason they have also been called the Thue–Morse set.
In the Bible, scholars claim that God created the world in six days and used the seventh day to rest. Because of this, the number seven is used to illustrate an idea of completeness throughout the Bible. In both Islam and Judaism, there are seven heavens.
9: Just as the number four has a bad-luck soundalike in Chinese, 9 is feared in Japan because it sounds similar to the Japanese word for torture or suffering.
In many cultures, black is thought to be unlucky and black cats, in particular, are said to bring bad luck to anyone that crosses their path. In China, white is generally seen as unlucky, while Brazil and Thailand consider purple to be a colour that can bring about misfortune to anyone who uses it outside of a funeral.
But the number four is considered unlucky because it sounds a lot like the word for “death,” and as a result Chinese buildings often lack a fourth floor (just as American buildings sometimes skip the 13th). Likewise, Chinese drivers avoid license plates ending in four.
The top 10 are: 11, 7, 17, 27,19, 23, 12,13, 9 and 18. So how do you pick lucky numbers? For those who use birthdays, five of the most commonly drawn numbers are more than 31, meaning they are not likely to have picked them. Another approach that is commonly used is to look for numbers that have not come up in a while.
The numbers 3, 6, and 8 are generally considered to be lucky, while 4 is considered unlucky. These traditions are not unique to Chinese culture, with other countries with a history of Han characters also having similar beliefs stemming from these concepts.
Lucky colours: Yellow, dark green, dark blue.
The number 0 is a whole number as well as an even one, especially for money, and is thus considered a lucky digit.
The number 8 is considered the luckiest of numbers in China and they believe the more 8's the better. The Cantonese word for eight, which is pronounced “ba”, sounds similar to the word which means “prosper” or “wealth”. In regional dialects the words for “eight” and “fortune” are also similar.
Many businesses even hang the number above their door. However, in Japan specifically, the number 9 is a bad-luck number that sounds like “suffering” when spoken aloud; so a price of $9.99, while common in the West, would be viewed negatively.
No. Although the 13th number is considered unlucky as per western superstition, there is no such belief in vaastu shastra that buying a flat on 13th floor is unlucky.
Some say it's unlucky because 111 resembles three stumps without bails, which obviously equates to a dismissal. Others say it originates from famed British Royal Navy flag officer Admiral Lord Nelson, who supposedly had one eye, one arm and one leg towards the end of his life.
Stats show that in the last 12 months, sales for new homes numbered 13 declined just 0.4 per cent less than houses with other numbers.