2digit.org

Your guide to those tricky numbers you can’t count to on your fingers

Our Mission

Humanity has always struggled with numbers. We’ve scraped by with our ten fingers for way too many years to count, but our modern world threatens to turn us all into machines as it forces ever-longer digit sequences into our heads.

Let’s say you need to memorize the six-digit code 325587. Such an act would typically cost a fraction of your soul. But with the right training, you can defensively convert these unnatural numbers back into human-friendly concepts: 32 is freezing point in Fahrenheit (the most human-friendly temperature scale), 55 is the speed we all pretend to drive on the highway, and 87 is the famous Gettysburg Address number (“Four score and seven years ago...”). Now you’re imagining Abraham Lincoln driving down the highway in the winter, hoping he doesn’t hit a patch of ice. Your soul is safe!

Here at 2digit.org, we’re building a catalog of every two-digit number from 11 to 99 (skipping the pure multiples of 10, at least for now), and we need your help! Certain numbers are more unnatural than others, and may require more creative associations.

Now, let's try another code, this time randomly generated:

847776

Creating a mnemonic is left as an exercise to the reader, with help from the following entries in the catalog:

MISSING:
84
Add entry
Max May 26, 2024, 04:06 PM Edit 77
Again with the Swedes and their weird numbers (see 17). During World War II, sjuttiosju (77) was used as a password at the Swedish border, since it's difficult to pronounce if you're not a native speaker. (The SJ sound has no equivalent in English or almost any other language, and it's used twice in quick succession here.)
Max May 21, 2024, 12:19 AM Edit 76
Known as "The America Number". In 1776, the colonists signed the Declaration of Independence, though somehow the Revolutionary War actually happened between 1775 and 83.
Catalog
Extra

History: View recent catalog entries

About: Read the author’s half-baked philosophy of mnemonics