10 Explained

10 (ten) is the even natural number following 9 and preceding 11. Ten is the base of the decimal numeral system, the most common system of denoting numbers in both spoken and written language.

Linguistics

• A collection of ten items (most often ten years) is called a decade.
• The ordinal adjective is decimal; the distributive adjective is denary.
• Increasing a quantity by one order of magnitude is most widely understood to mean multiplying the quantity by ten.
• To reduce something by one tenth is to decimate. (In ancient Rome, the killing of one in ten soldiers in a cohort was the punishment for cowardice or mutiny; or, one-tenth of the able-bodied men in a village as a form of retribution, thus causing a labor shortage and threat of starvation in agrarian societies.)

Mathematics

Ten is the smallest noncototient number.^[1] There are exactly 10 small Pisot numbers that do not exceed the golden ratio.^[2]

Decagon

See main article: Decagon.

A ten sided polygon is called a decagon.

Science

The SI prefix for 10 is "deca-".

The meaning "10" is part of the following terms:

• decapoda, an order of crustaceans with ten feet.
• decane, a hydrocarbon with 10 carbon atoms.

10 is:

• The atomic number of neon.
• The number of hydrogen atoms in butane, a hydrocarbon.
• The number of spacetime dimensions in some superstring theories.

The metric system is based on the number 10, so converting units is done by adding or removing zeros (e.g. 1 centimetre = 10 millimetres, 1 decimetre = 10 centimetres, 1 meter = 100 centimetres, 1 dekametre = 10 meters, 1 kilometre = 1,000 meters).

Music

• The interval of a major tenth is an octave plus a major third.
• The interval of a minor tenth is an octave plus a minor third.

Religion

Abrahamic religions

The Ten Commandments in the Hebrew Bible are ethical commandments decreed by God (to Moses) for the people of Israel to follow.

Mysticism

• In Pythagoreanism, the number 10 played an important role and was symbolized by the tetractys.
• There are Ten Sephirot in the Kabbalistic Tree of Life.
• In Chinese astrology, the 10 Heavenly Stems, refer to a cyclic number system that is used also for time reckoning.

See also

• • List of highways numbered 10

Notes and References

1. Web site: Sloane's A005278 : Noncototients. The On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences. OEIS Foundation. 2016-06-01.
2. Book: M.J. Bertin . A. Decomps-Guilloux . M. Grandet-Hugot . M. Pathiaux-Delefosse . J.P. Schreiber . Pisot and Salem Numbers . Birkhäuser . 1992 . 3-7643-2648-4 .