What is xlviii

That's right: Despite the fact that we see that shiny silver trophy complete with Roman numerals everywhere — on frat guys' shirts, orange juice cartons, and more — fans have difficulty translating XLVIII's Roman numerals into Arabic numerals. I'm here to help. But in this particular case, when the X comes before a number, it subtracts from its total value. So since L is 50, the preceding X takes away 10 of its value, leaving you with Then you add the 5 points for the V and the 3 "I"s and you get a grand total of 48, which is how many total Super Bowls there have been.

But how many people actually knew that? We hit the streets to find out. It turns out most people tend to know what is in Roman numerals, but that L really throws people off.

His total guess, cut off by this Instagram video, was The woman below knew what each of the numerals meant — she just couldn't add them together, given the tricky X subtraction. The converter lets you go from arabic to roman numerals and vice versa. Simply type in the number you would like to convert in the field you would like to convert from, and the number in the other format will appear in the other field. Due to the limitations of the roman number system you can only convert numbers from 1 to To easily convert between roman and arabic numerals you can use the table above.

The key is to handle one arabic digit at a time, and translate it to the right roman number, where zeroes become empty. Go ahead and use the converter and observe how the table shows the solution in realtime! Here is the current date and time written in roman numerals.

Since the roman number system doesn't have a zero, the hour, minute, and second component of the timestamps sometimes become empty. Here you can read more about what happened in the year The right column shows how each roman numeral adds up to the total. Roman numerals originate, as the name suggests, from the Ancient Roman empire.