If you’ve ever sat through a high school history lecture, you’ve heard the word. It usually shows up right at the beginning of the Gettysburg Address. Abraham Lincoln stood there in 1863 and started talking about "four score and seven years ago." Most of us just nodded along, assuming it meant "a long time." But if you’re trying to figure out exactly how long is a score, the answer is actually incredibly simple, even if the history behind it is a bit messy.
A score is twenty. That's it.
Twenty years, twenty sheep, twenty stones. If you have a score of something, you have twenty of them. It’s an old-school way of counting that has mostly faded out of our daily vocabulary, replaced by the decimal system and our obsession with tens. But for centuries, this was how people tracked everything from their age to their livestock.
Why 20? The Logic Behind How Long Is a Score
It’s not some random number pulled out of a hat. Honestly, it's about your hands and feet.
Think about it. We use a base-10 system because we have ten fingers. It’s easy. You count them, you hit ten, you start over. But ancient civilizations—and plenty of rural folks up until the last century—didn't stop at their fingers. They counted their toes, too. This is what mathematicians call a "vigesimal" system.
The word itself actually comes from the Old Norse word skor. Back then, if you were counting a large number of items, you’d make a notch or a "score" in a stick every time you hit twenty. It was a physical marker. You’d count twenty cattle, carve a line in your tally stick, and start the next batch.
So, when Lincoln said "four score and seven," he wasn’t being vague. He was doing math. Four times twenty is eighty. Add seven, and you get eighty-seven. He was referencing 1776 from the perspective of 1863. It was precise. It sounded grander than saying "eighty-seven years," but the measurement was exact.
The Bible and the Human Lifespan
You’ll see this measurement pop up a lot in the King James Version of the Bible. There’s a famous line in Psalm 90:10 that talks about the length of a human life. It says: "The days of our years are threescore years and ten."
If you do the math—three times twenty plus ten—you get seventy.
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For a huge chunk of human history, seventy was seen as the "standard" full life. If you were healthy and lucky, you might hit "fourscore" (eighty). This specific phrasing influenced how English speakers thought about time for hundreds of years. It’s why the term feels so heavy and "olde world" today. We don't say we're three score years old; we say we're sixty. But the weight of that traditional counting still lingers in our literature.
Language Shifts and the Death of the Score
Why did we stop using it?
French still clings to it, actually. If you want to say the number eighty in French, you say quatre-vingts, which literally translates to "four twenties." It’s a direct holdover from that vigesimal way of thinking. English, however, got lazy. Or efficient, depending on how you look at it.
As the metric system and standardized decimal counting took over global commerce, "score" became a poetic relic. We kept the "dozen" for eggs and "gross" for bulk supplies, but the "score" mostly went the way of the "cubit."
It’s interesting, though, because we still use the word in other contexts. You "score" a point in a game. You "score" a piece of wood before snapping it. You "score" a musical arrangement. All of these meanings trace back to that original physical act of cutting a mark into a surface. The number twenty just happened to be the point where you made the mark.
Is it still relevant?
Mostly for trivia. And history buffs.
If you're reading Shakespeare or the King James Bible, you have to know how long is a score or the sentences won't make sense. You'll miss the scale of what's being discussed. In Macbeth, an Old Man mentions "Threescore and ten I can remember well," emphasizing that he has lived a full, complete life and has never seen anything as strange as the events of the play.
Real-World Examples of Vigesimal Counting
While English has mostly moved on, other cultures haven't.
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- Mayan Mathematics: The Mayans were geniuses with a base-20 system. Their entire calendar and astronomical calculations were built on it.
- Dzongkha: The national language of Bhutan still uses a vigesimal system for counting.
- Welsh: Traditional Welsh counting is based on twenties. For example, forty is deugain (two twenties).
It’s a reminder that "ten" isn't the only way to organize the world. It’s just the way that won the popularity contest in the West.
Misconceptions About the Word
Some people think a score is a decade. It’s not. That’s a ten-year span.
Others confuse it with a "fortnight," which is two weeks (fourteen nights).
Then there’s the "score" in music, which refers to the written notation. That has nothing to do with the number twenty. It refers to the "scores" or lines drawn to connect the staves in a musical manuscript.
Understanding the "Score" in Modern Contexts
If you use the word "score" today to mean twenty, people might look at you funny. It’s archaic. But it has a certain rhythmic quality that "twenty" lacks.
"Three score years" sounds like a legacy. "Sixty years" sounds like a retirement plan.
There's a reason Martin Luther King Jr. opened his "I Have a Dream" speech with "Five score years ago." He was echoing Lincoln. He was using the weight of that specific measurement—one hundred years—to bridge the gap between the Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil Rights Movement. By using the term "score," he tied his moment in 1963 to the historical gravity of 1863.
Actionable Takeaways for Using "Score" Correcty
If you want to use this term in your writing or understand it better in historical texts, keep these points in mind:
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1. The Math is Static
Always multiply the number of "scores" by 20.
- Two score = 40
- Three score = 60
- Four score = 80
- Five score = 100
2. Use it for Tone, Not Clarity
Only use "score" if you are aiming for a formal, historical, or poetic tone. In a business report, saying you expect "three score new leads" will just confuse your boss.
3. Check the Context
If you see the word in a technical manual or a sports article, it almost certainly refers to a tally or a cut, not the number twenty.
4. Remember the "Score" Notch
To remember the definition, visualize a shepherd counting sheep. Every time he hits twenty, he carves a deep line (a score) into his wooden staff. That visual link between the act of "scoring" and the number twenty is the easiest way to keep the fact locked in your brain.
Language changes. Numbers stay the same. Whether you’re reading a 400-year-old play or a 160-year-old speech, knowing that a score is exactly twenty allows you to see the timeline exactly as the author intended. It turns vague "old-timey" talk into concrete data.
Next Steps
To truly master historical measurements, your next move should be looking into the "hand" (used for horses) or the "stone" (still used in the UK for body weight). Understanding these units provides a much clearer picture of how people measured their world before everything was standardized into grams and meters. If you’re writing historical fiction or analyzing primary sources, create a quick conversion cheat sheet for these terms so you don't have to break your flow to do the math.