Published in the WOW! supplement of the Evening Echo

Image by Rev Dan Catt under the this CC license.

There’s nothing particularly special about five. It’s just a number, nestled between four and six. There’s no real reason why five should take on any more significance than the numbers that precede or follow it, and yet somehow it does.

Five minutes, for example, tends to be a much more significant division of time than, say, 3 minutes or seven minutes. Why? Why do people tend to make five year plans, rather than three year ones? The most destructive tornadoes are ranked F-5 on the Fujita scale, and the worst hurricanes rate as category five on the Saffir-Simpson scale. Five, five, five!

Maybe it’s as simple as the fact that we have five digits on each hand and foot that leads us to lend more weight to the number. Who knows?

Some other distinctions enjoyed by the number five: it is the atomic number of boron, the number of books in the Torah, the number of times each day that muslims pray to Allah, the number of oceans in the world, the number of human senses (sight, sound, smell, touch and taste) and the number of vowels in the English alphabet, to list but a few.

Of course, when you’re four, with only a week to go until your birthday, five suddenly becomes a very significant number indeed. The little one had been hyper all week, planning her party, changing her mind about this detail or that. No boys, she’d decided… and no adults, except for Mum and Dad, she conceded.

“You two have to come,” she said, “someone has to make the food and mind all the kids.” Charming!

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