Quinary

Quinary /ˈkwaɪnəri/ (base 5 or pental) is a numeral system with five as the base. A possible origination of a quinary system is that there are five digits on either hand.

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In the quinary place system, five numerals, from 0 to 4, are used to represent any real number. According to this method, five is written as 10, twenty-five is written as 100, and sixty is written as 220.

As five is a prime number, only the reciprocals of the powers of five terminate, although its location between two highly composite numbers (4 and 6) guarantees that many recurring fractions have relatively short periods.

Today, the main usage of quinary is as a biquinary system, which is decimal using five as a sub-base. Another example of a sub-base system is sexagesimal (base sixty), which used ten as a sub-base.

Each quinary digit can hold (approx. 2.32) bits of information.

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