Why do clocks with roman numerals all have IIII instead of IV?
Is there anything the master doesn’t know?
Oh yeah, welcome to the boards dot and/or russ!
In this case, I’d say yes. The linked column is hardly conclusive.
I heard somewhere that they use IIII because some king had trouble remembering the difference between IV and VI, but I’m sure that info is of the quality of non-echoing duck quacks.
Well, evidently, he doesn’t know why clocks use IIII instead of IV. 
I like the explanation of the one dude who wrote in, regarding the ease of making sets of characters with IIII instead of IV.
I’d never noticed the IIII thing before, strange.
I once read that there is no real standard for Roman numerals. If, for example, you wanted to write MIM instead of MCMLXLIX for 1999, feel free to do so. In fact, it is unclear why it is standard to write IX instead of VIV. So if you want to write IIII go ahead. BTW, I once met of professor of mathematics who apparently thought that IV was 6. Civilization make a great advance when Roman numberals were replaced by Hindu-Arabic numerals, in the face of enormous resistance and I cannot imagine why we still use them. Addition and subtraction required advanced study and multiplication and division were essentially impossible.
IV is the new reperesntation for the number 4 in Roman n numberials. It was changed from IIII in 1965AD. Since they stopped teaching latin you most likely couldn’t read the memo.
Thank you all so much. What a great web site.