What is Ones? Definition, Facts, Example (2024)

What is Ones?

In elementary school, students learn to count using numbers, and the first number they learn is “1” or “one.”

The value “one” represents any quantity that is singular in number. Every other number is composed of this “one” in the form of combinations or groups. For example, if we had more than one number of objects like in the given image

We could call this “one and one more,” but if the number of objects increased further, it would become very cumbersome to keep writing in the form of “one and one and….” or we could simply compose another number and call this as “2 ones” or simply “2”.

The numbers 3 to 9 are all composed similarly.

However, as we go further and the numbers become bigger, it becomes difficult to represent numbers by just using the number “one.” What if we have a lot of objects? Like in this image:

There are more than 9 objects here, but if we only keep using “ones,” it would become cumbersome every time we wanted to tell the quantity of an object to someone and started drawing so many of them. This is where “tens” comes to our rescue. We combine “9 ones” and one more “ones” to make a “10” or “1 ten”.

Now, we can represent the same quantity as “1 ten and 2 ones” or the number “12”.

As the number of objects increases, we keep grouping and making tens.
For example, the number 37 means “3 tens and 7 ones”.

Thus we form bigger numbers and use “tens” and “ones” as our basic units to make counting easier.

These units are called place values.

Place Values

All two-digit numbers are composed of tens and ones.

For example, in the number 56, 5 is at the tens place, and 6 is at the ones place.

That is, the number 56 means 5 tens and 6 ones and would represent these many objects:

Here, each rod represents 1 ten and is comprised of 10 ones.

Factoid 1: The numbers 10, 20, 30, 40… can be written as 1 ten, 2 tens, 3 tens, 4 tens, and so on.

Factoid 2: The largest one-digit number that we can make using ones is 9 and the largest two-digit number is 99, which means “9 tens and 9 ones”.

Solved Examples

Example 1. Write the number of objects given below in the form of tens and ones.

Answer: 1 ten and 4 ones.

Example 2. Which digit is at the ones place in 68?

Answer: 8

Example 3. What is the place of the underlined digit in 95?

Answer: Ones

Example 4. Identify the number represented in the given picture.

Answer: There are 4 tens and 4 ones, so the number is 44.

Practice Problems

Frequently Asked Questions