42
Number — gematria and numerology meaning
Forty-two has an unusual place in popular culture as "the answer to life, the universe and everything" in Douglas Adams's 1979 radio comedy The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which Adams said he chose as an arbitrary and ordinary number. It is also the number of lines on each page of the Gutenberg Bible, which is why it is called the 42-line Bible. It reduces to Six in numerology.
In ancient Egyptian belief, as described in the Book of the Dead, the dead person stands before 42 divine judges and declares themselves innocent of 42 wrongs in the "negative confession," which makes forty-two a number of judgment in that tradition.
Number facts
- 42 is a composite number. Its prime factors are 2 × 3 × 7.
- In numerology it reduces to a single digit: 4+2=6. The root number is 6, and many numerologists read repeated-digit numbers through that root.
Other numbers in this dictionary are listed on the numbers index.
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