In a class I was in recently, the page numbers in the beginning of the textbook were all roman numerals. The teacher looked at the page number and said, “Oh boy, there are a whole lot of Xs and Vs here.” A class member suggested he just read the page number literally (saying the letters such as “x x v i i”) instead of trying to figure out the number. The rest of the class agreed.

The Romans would be saddened.

I thought I was pretty good with roman numerals, but I’m not as good as I thought. I found this Roman numeral converter which also has a self test, which I took to see how good I was. I answered 85% correctly out of 25 questions (they get progressively harder as you answer correctly). The ones I missed were in the hundreds. For instance, I entered CICI for 191 instead of CXCI. I found I’m better at figuring out what number the roman numerals represent rather than coming up with it on my own.

I still believe I’m proficient with numbers under 100, and unless you’re looking at the back of a dollar bill (MDCCLXXVI, or 1776), that’s all the roman numerals I see.