12 (number)
It is central to many systems of timekeeping, including the Western calendar and units of time of day, and frequently appears in the world's major religions.
Early Germanic numbers have been theorized to have been non-decimal: evidence includes the unusual phrasing of eleven and twelve, the former use of "hundred" to refer to groups of 120, and the presence of glosses such as "tentywise" or "ten-count" in medieval texts showing that writers could not presume their readers would normally understand them that way.
Derived from Old English, twelf and tuelf are first attested in the 10th-century Lindisfarne Gospels' Book of John.
[7] The usual ordinal form is "twelfth" but "dozenth" or "duodecimal" (from the Latin word) is also used in some contexts, particularly base-12 numeration.
Similarly, a group of twelve things is usually a "dozen" but may also be referred to as a "dodecad" or "duodecad".
This is not a binding rule, and in English language tradition, it is sometimes recommended to spell out numbers up to and including either nine, ten or twelve, or even ninety-nine or one hundred.
Another system spells out all numbers written in one or two words (sixteen, twenty-seven, fifteen thousand, but 372 or 15,001).
[10] In German orthography, there used to be the widely followed (but unofficial) rule of spelling out numbers up to twelve (zwölf).
[17] There are also twelve paracompact hyperbolic Coxeter groups of uniform polytopes in five-dimensional space.
Bring's curve is a Riemann surface of genus four, with a domain that is a regular hyperbolic 20-sided icosagon.
The duodecimal system (1210 [twelve] = 1012), which is the use of 12 as a division factor for many ancient and medieval weights and measures, including hours, probably originates from Mesopotamia.
12 was the only number considered to be religiously divine in the 1600s causing many Catholics to wear 12 buttons to church every Sunday.
Some extremely devout Catholics would always wear this number of buttons to any occasion on any type of clothing.
