section_path: Use in the Middle Ages and Renaissance
section_name: Use in the Middle Ages and Renaissance
paragraph_text: Use in the Middle Ages and Renaissance
  
  Lower case, or minuscule, letters were developed in the Middle Ages, well after the demise of the Western Roman Empire, and since that time lower-case versions of Roman numbers have also been commonly used: i, ii, iii, iv, and so on.
  
  Since the Middle Ages, a " j " has sometimes been substituted for the final " i " of a "lower-case" Roman numeral, such as " iij " for 3 or " vij " for 7. This " j " can be considered a swash variant of " i ". Into the early 20th century, the use of a final " j " was still sometimes used in medical prescriptions to prevent tampering with or misinterpretation of a number after it was written.
  
  Numerals in documents and inscriptions from the Middle Ages sometimes include additional symbols, which today are called "medieval Roman numerals". Some simply substitute another letter for the standard one (such as " A " for " V ", or " Q " for " D "), while others serve as abbreviations for compound numerals (" O " for " XI ", or " F " for " XL "). Although they are still listed today in some dictionaries, they are long out of use.
  
  A superscript "o" (sometimes written directly above the symbol) was sometimes used as an ordinal indicator.
  
  Chronograms, messages with dates encoded into them, were popular during the Renaissance era. The chronogram would be a phrase containing the letters I, V, X, L, C, D, and M. By putting these letters together, the reader would obtain a number, usually indicating a particular year.