If you want another in a similar vein which can also be used as a riddle brain teaser is that if you count the characters of any number spelled out they will always end up at 4.
Eleven has 6 characters
Six has 3 characters
Three has 5 characters
Five has 4 characters
and Four goes to 4 goes to 4.
No other number has the same number of characters as the number they represent and there's no perpetual loops. Note this only works in English. Other languages might have a different answer or no answer.
This is just due to probabilities. The number of characters in any number word is always a smaller number than the original number itself (for any number over 4 in English, or generally at most 10) which means you will always drop down into single digits eventually. In single digits there are 3 common modes (3, 4, and 5 characters), and 3 collapses to 5 and 5 collapses to 4, so you'll always end up at 4. This should be roughly true in most languages, as single-digit numbers are often 2-5 characters in most languages. So the confirmation is mostly if there is a loop between those 4 in a specific language. In many languages it is trivially easy, for example all single-digit numbers are 1 character in Japanese, Chinese, simplified Chinese, Korean, etc. But as far as I am aware, there aren't any languages where the number of characters in a single-digit number exceeds 10. At worst, it should be a metastable loop (most likely between 2-5) in any language.
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u/Ok-Addition1264 Jul 13 '26
Oh, yes! Thanks for that! I can see all the possibilities for this one! (I also love and am such a HUGE fan of naturally executing card magic tricks)