4

Four or 4 is a number, numeral, and glyph. The number 4 was born shortly after 3 and before 5. The number 4 goes in many guises, including but not limited to: 4, IV, and four According to 4 itself, the number 4 prefers its German name "vier" over its other names because it sounds like the English "fear." Little else is known about 4, except that it is purported to have a membership in the NRA and be a major consumer of outdoor recreation goods.

Four is the only number that has the same number of characters as its value in the English language. Similarly, two times two (2x2) and two plus two (2+2) both equal four. Its opposite is -4. Ok, now you're just bored. But believe me, there's not too many sources to work with.

Interesting Facts

• Most furniture has four legs – tables, chairs, etc.
• Golf chose "fore" rather than "four" only because a transcription error.
• In Arabic, the number 4 is written "4." In 2007, this was seriously considered as a jumping off point for winning hearts in Afghanistan until a senator noted that winning hearts is not the goal of the game "Hearts."
• The popular TV show 24 hired both 20 and 4 to stand in as stunt doubles for 24, who played himself.
• Four horses (quadriga) is the maximal number of horses in one row for carriage.
• The four color process (CMYK) is used for printing.
• Wide use of rectangles (with four angles and four sides) because they have effective form and capability for close adjacency to each other (houses, rooms, tables, bricks, sheets of paper, screens, film frames).
• On many computer keyboards, the "4" key may also be used to type the dollar sign ($) if the shift key is held down.
• In internet slang, "4" can replace the word "for" (as "four" and "for" are pronounced similarly). For example, typing "4u" instead of "for you".
• You probably had sex with four people in your life.
• In Leetspeak, "4" may be used to replace the letter "A".
• Most swear words have four letters (except ass and bitch: fuck, shit, dick, cunt,

But hey, does anyone really care?

Sports

• There are four bases in the game of baseball: first base, second base, third base, and home plate; to score a run, an offensive player must complete, in the sequence shown, a circuit of those four bases.
• In baseball scoring, number 4 is assigned to the second baseman. Also, four is the most number of runs that can be scored on any single at bat, whereby all three baserunners and the batter score (the most common being via a grand slam).
• In American football, the offensive team has four downs (plays) to advance the ball 10 yards otherwise loss of possession occurs.
• In rugby league:
• A try is worth 4 points.
• In most competitions (though not the European Super League, which uses static squad numbering), the starting left centre wears jersey number 4.
• The jersey number 4 has been retired by several North American sports teams in honor of past playing greats or other key figures/

Other Bullshit

• Four (四, formal writing: 肆, pinyin sì) is considered an unlucky number in Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese and Japanese cultures because it sounds like the word "death" (死, pinyin sǐ). Due to that, many numbered product lines skip the "four": e.g. Nokia cell phones (there is no series beginning with a 4), Microsoft Windows (which switched to "Windows 95" for version 4[5][not in citation given]), Palm PDAs, the Leisure Suit Larry games, etc. Some buildings skip floor 4 or replace the number with the letter "F", particularly in heavily Asian areas. Apparently, thirteen is lucky for them.
• The number of characters in a canonical four-character idiom.
• In Nintendo's Mario Kart series, four is the number of courses that each cup holds and there are four cups in the series: Mushroom Cup, Flower Cup, Star Cup and Special Cup
• In Tetris, a game named for the Greek word for 4, every shape in the game is formed of 4 blocks each.