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It caught my attention the character 伍 with the meaning of "five".

I've seen it recently in the anime "Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba", in which some characters have kanji tattooed in their eyes. There is one that has 下伍 indicating he is "lower five" in rank.

Why 下伍 and not 下五?

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伍 is an alternative Japanese numeral that is used in formal documents. This documents can include legal documents. When they are used in legal documents, these set of numerals can prevent contracts, checks, and other documents from being changed or manipulated after printing. For example, the standard kanji for 1, 2, and 3 can be incremented up by the addition of a single stroke. Therefore, more complex kanji like 壱 (one) are used to prevent this practice. We encounter the same problem with Hindu-Arabic numerals in English, so we parenthetically spell out the number in English for the same effect. For example, “the merchant agrees to deliver 2 (two) units to the customer.”

There are, however, other uses for these kanji. They have a certain cachet to them. They are old-fashioned and formal, perhaps a little more Chinese than everyday numeric kanji. In the manga you saw it in, it probably is meant to look cool. Being set in the Taisho period may have contributed to this style decision, and furthermore the “coolness factor” is applicable even to stories set in the present or future (e.g. Neon Genesis Evangelion).

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I believe its a formal kanji used in legal documents. Also I read that its a jinmeiyō kanji, a kanji used for names. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jinmeiy%C5%8D_kanji

The author probably chose to write more formal and older kanji because the story is set in the Taisho Period. Thats just my guess.

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    To answer your question "when should i use each one?". 五 you can use pretty much all the time、whilst 伍 probably only needs to be used in formal documents. Commented Jul 17, 2020 at 8:33
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伍 was used to prevent falsifying the accounts. Such older notations are called Daiji (大字) in Japanese (see Wikipedia in Japanese 大字(数字)). In formal, in Japanese law only allowed to use 壱、弐、参、拾 (one, two, three, ten) and other characters like 肆, 陸 are not used now.

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  • I’m going to have to question how 伍 helps prevent fraudulent number manipulation. Analysis may be correct for 一、 =、三 and some other examples, but the kanji for 5 don’t seem affected by this pattern.
    – Ragaroni
    Commented Jul 18, 2020 at 8:49
  • The key is to make complicate the characters. When the characters are simple, it may illegally be changed by someone. I do not have a simple example for 伍 but all characters from zero to ten are complicated.
    – Keith 326
    Commented Jul 19, 2020 at 17:57

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