What are romans?

Romans are people who lived a long time ago in a big place called Rome, and they had a special way of writing numbers using letters.

Imagine you have building blocks, and each block has a letter on it. The Romans used these letters as blocks to show numbers, kind of like how you might stack blocks to make towers. For example, the letter I is like one block, so I = 1.

Sometimes they used bigger blocks too! Like a V for 5 or an X for 10. If you put them together, it’s like making bigger towers, IX means 9 (like 10 minus 1), and XL means 40 (like 50 minus 10).

It's a fun way to count, just like counting blocks on the floor!