Why is seven considered a lucky number? And why is it the winning and/or losing number in the game of craps? I was also wondering who invented the game of dice or craps?
Of course that’s just my opinion I could be wrong.
Dennis Miller
Dice have been around for more than 2,000 years. It was Julius Caesar that first said “The die is cast!”
Here’s a history of craps:
http://www.harrahstahoe.com/craps/history.html
I don’t know about lucky number seven, but I’ll bet it has something to do with astrology.
There is some belief (Cecil for one) that the reason for the interest in the number 7 is because it’s a prime number, like 3 and 13. Why it’s lucky (and not unlucky) I don’t know.
Mr. K’s Link of the Month:
It is a biblical “holy number” so to speak.
The ever insensitive, politically incorrect PitBullDawg. Political correctness is a disease. Cure it with the truth.
Seven being a magic or mystic or potent number dates back to ancient Babylonia, at least. I don’t think anyone knows for sure – it’s not like the number of fingers or anything clear cut. Seven was a mystic number from ancient astrology/astronomy, since there were seven objects in the sky known to be “out of sync” with the motion of the stars (five planets, sun and moon.) Presumably there was more to it than that, but I don’t have any references handy that give any further indication.
By Biblical times, of course – say before 1000 BC – seven as a lucky number was fairly well established in Israelite society – seven days for creation, etc. – whence it moved into Western culture.
If you throw 2 fair dice, the number 7 is most likely to come up. There are six combinations for the point 7: (1,6),(6,1),(2,5),(5,2),(3,4),(4,3). There are five combinations for the points 6 and 8. Four for 5 and 9, three for 4 and 10. Two for 3 and 11. And one each for 2 and 12. Out of 36 combinations you have a 1/6 chance of throwing a 7, more than any other number.
Nothing magical about it. It’s just magical that even with this general information, Las Vegas casinos still haul in truckloads of cash at the expense of deluded dreamers.
There’s always another beer.
The actual answer is lost to time. However there are some interesting conjectures. Historically we can certainly trace the antecedents to Mesopotamia. the astrological/astronomical connection seems sound, and the Sun/Moon/5 planets idea has merit. I have also run across an interesting conjecture that argues for a southern/northern hemisphere demarcation in fortuitous numbers. IIRC that author argued that it was related to the dominate constellations found in each hemisphere (dipper/southern cross). Of course, all told it is simply another story; we have no direct evidence and far from enough indirect evidence to form a valid conclusion.
Just something to throw into the mix - while seven is the lucky number in Western culture, eight is the lucky number in China.
Which I find interesting because the western aesthetic prefers designs which are very rigorously geometric or balanced, i.e. everything tends to fit together fairly precisely. Seven is outside of this geometric precision. Oriental aesthetics are almost exactly opposite, they don’t like anything which fits in a simple geometry.
seven is indeed the number that statistically is most likely to come up.
For OCD people, the lucky number is 5.