German Lucky Numbers: 3, 4, 7 and the Unlucky 13

In German number culture the lucky numbers are 3, 4 and 7, and the unlucky one is 13. None of it runs on sound. German has no number word that puns on death or wealth the way Cantonese does, so the beliefs are carried by other things entirely: a legal custom for three, a rare plant for four, a saint's day and a beetle for seven, and the guest list at the Last Supper for thirteen. The mechanism here is story, not pronunciation.

Drei comes out of medieval law. The Thing, the Germanic assembly that heard cases, sat three times a year, and an accused man had to be summoned three times before judgment could go against him in his absence. That is where «Aller guten Dinge sind drei» starts. Vier belongs to the vierblättriges Kleeblatt, a variation on white clover rare enough to be worth pocketing. Sieben arrived through Christian counting and settled into the folktales the Grimms collected. Dreizehn is the number that breaks the dozen, and German calls it the Teufelsdutzend.

Germans are not, on the whole, anxious about numbers, and most of this survives as ritual rather than conviction. The Glücksbringer sold every 31 December come with a wink attached. Thirteen is taken more seriously by institutions than by individuals: airlines renumber seat rows and some hotels skip room 13, while a German living at house number 13 rarely gives it a thought. Carnival goes the other way and treats eleven as deliberate nonsense.

Lucky: 3, 4, 7
Avoided: 13
Where: Germany, Austria and German-speaking Switzerland
Language: German
Mechanism: drei dry ≈ «Aller guten Dinge sind drei»
Sourced claims: 5 on this page

The wordplay behind it

What each number sounds like, stands for, or resolves to. This table is the whole explanation in one place.

Number	Written	Read as	Echoes	Meaning
3	drei	dry	«Aller guten Dinge sind drei»	all good things come in threes	Lucky
4	vier	feer	vierblättriges Kleeblatt	four-leaf clover	Lucky
7	sieben	zee-ben	Siebenpunkt-Marienkäfer	the seven-spot ladybird	Lucky
11	elf	elf	Narrenzahl	the fools' number of Carnival	Both
12	zwölf	tsvurlf	Dutzend, from Old French dozeine	a dozen, the complete count	Both
13	dreizehn	dry-tsayn	Teufelsdutzend	the devil's dozen	Avoided

The lucky numbers: 3, 4, 7

One at a time, with the mechanism and one place it actually shows up.

3 — three sittings of the court

«Aller guten Dinge sind drei», all good things are three, is what a German says on a third attempt, and the origin is procedural rather than mystical. In the medieval German-speaking lands the Thing, the popular court, met three times a year, and a defendant had to be called three times before a judgment could be entered against him in his absence. Three summonses meant a case had been properly heard. The saying kept the shape of the rule and quietly lost the law behind it, and now it mostly excuses a third slice of cake.

4 — the four-leaf clover

The vierblättriges Kleeblatt is the plainest German lucky charm and the only one with a measurable rarity. A four-leaflet white clover is a developmental variation rather than a species of its own. A 2017 volunteer count of roughly 5.7 million clover plants across six European countries turned up one four-leaf specimen for every 5,076 ordinary ones, about twice as often as the folk figure of one in ten thousand. Finding one counts precisely because it took looking.

7 — the beetle, the tailor and the weather

Sieben is the German folk number for a complete run of something. Grimm's brave little tailor swats seven flies and embroiders «Siebene auf einen Streich» on his belt. There are seven kids for the wolf, seven ravens, seven dwarfs. The country's stock lucky charm is the Siebenpunkt-Marienkäfer, Coccinella septempunctata, and the seven black spots are the reason it won that role over the roughly eighty other ladybird species recorded in Germany. Siebenschläfertag on 27 June is supposed to set the weather for the seven weeks that follow.

The numbers to avoid: 13

Same treatment. Where an avoidance has a documented cost, it is named.

13 — die verflixte Dreizehn

Thirteen is the number that overruns the dozen, and German names it for that: Teufelsdutzend, the devil's dozen, or in everyday speech die verflixte Dreizehn. The idiom «Jetzt schlägt's dreizehn!», now it is striking thirteen, means something outrageous has happened, because a church clock stops at twelve. German sources give the usual Last Supper reading, twelve apostles plus Judas making thirteen at the table. Freitag der 13. carries the same weight as Friday the 13th in English, and no more.

Where you actually meet it

On 31 December German shops fill with Glücksbringer. The four-leaved plant in the small pot is not clover at all, but Oxalis tetraphylla, a wood sorrel that grows four leaflets as standard, which is the only practical way to supply four-leaf luck by the pallet. Beside it sit marzipan pigs, carrying the phrase «Schwein gehabt», had a pig, meaning got lucky. Miniature chimney sweeps come from the centuries when a blocked flue meant a house fire. Horseshoes are hung with the opening upward so that the luck cannot run out of them.

Rhineland Carnival runs on eleven, and runs on it with a straight face. The session opens on 11 November at 11:11 in the morning. Committees are called the Elferrat, the council of eleven, and sittings begin eleven minutes past the hour rather than on it. The number was picked because it is wrong. Eleven sits one past the Ten Commandments and one short of the twelve apostles, which made it medieval shorthand for disorder, and disorder is the entire brief of the season.

Thirteen mostly turns up in numbering that institutions control. Lufthansa seat maps have no row 13 and no row 17, the second omission made for Italian and Brazilian passengers rather than German ones. Hotels and hospitals sometimes skip room 13, and some tall buildings skip the storey, though Germany has few enough high-rises for the habit to be less conspicuous than in North America. Where the number cannot be avoided it gets a nickname, and die verflixte Dreizehn is stock headline material for anything that fails on the thirteenth try.

Checkable claims

Each of these is a documented fact rather than a general impression, with the source named.

Lufthansa aircraft seat maps contain no row 13 and no row 17. The airline said in 2017 that both rows are missing because both are treated as unlucky, 13 across much of the West and 17 in Italy and Brazil, where XVII rearranges into the Latin VIXI.

Lufthansa statement, 2017, reported by Euronews

The Rhineland Carnival session opens every year on 11 November at 11:11 a.m. Eleven is the Narrenzahl, the fools' number, and Carnival committees are named Elferrat after it.

MDR Brisant, 'Karneval startet am 11.11. um 11:11 Uhr'

The Siebenschläfer rule claims the weather on 27 June sets the following seven weeks. The Deutscher Wetterdienst puts its hit rate at roughly 55 to 60 per cent inland and slightly above 60 per cent in the Alpine foothills.

Deutscher Wetterdienst (German national weather service)

The German lucky beetle is Coccinella septempunctata, named in German for the seven black spots on its wing cases. NABU records around 80 ladybird species in Germany.

NABU (Naturschutzbund Deutschland), species profile Siebenpunkt-Marienkäfer

Das verflixte 7. Jahr is the German release title of Billy Wilder's The Seven Year Itch, which opened in West Germany on 9 September 1955. The German phrase for a marriage crisis in year seven entered the language through that title.

German distribution title of The Seven Year Itch (1955)

What it changes

A four-leaf clover is a plant with an extra leaflet, and a seat map without a row 17 still seats exactly as many people. The German charms are worth knowing because each one carries real history inside it: a court that sat three times a year, a flue that had to be swept, a beetle that eats aphids. Enjoy the marzipan pig on New Year's Eve. Do not stake anything you would miss on it.

That is the line this site holds everywhere: a tradition is worth knowing, and no number has ever moved a probability. If you want a set of numbers to play with anyway, the daily generator makes one from your birth date and tells you exactly how.

German lucky numbers — frequently asked

Thirteen. German calls it the Teufelsdutzend, the devil's dozen, or die verflixte Dreizehn.

Because 17 is the unlucky number in Italy and Brazil, where the Roman numeral XVII rearranges into VIXI, Latin for 'I have lived'. Lufthansa carries a lot of passengers from both countries and dropped both rows rather than choose between two superstitions.

No, and that absence is the interesting part. Cantonese and Mandarin number luck runs on homophones, where 八 sounds like the word for prosper and 四 like the word for death. German number words sound like nothing worth chasing or avoiding, so everything on this page comes from law, religion, botany or a folktale instead.

The seven-year itch, the notion that a marriage runs into trouble around its seventh year. German took the phrase from the 1955 Billy Wilder film released there as Das verflixte 7. Jahr, and it is now used far outside the cinema.

Eleven is the Narrenzahl. It sits one above the Ten Commandments and one below the twelve apostles, so it belongs to neither order, which suited a season built on suspending the usual rules. The date itself, 11 November, also marked the old end of the harvest year.

The other traditions

Same questions, different language and different answers.

ChineseLucky 6 8 9 · avoid 4 IndianLucky 108 9 7 · avoid 8 ItalianLucky 3 7 13 · avoid 17 JapaneseLucky 3 7 8 · avoid 4 9 JewishLucky 18 7 13 · avoid 2 KoreanLucky 3 7 · avoid 4 RussianLucky 3 7 · avoid 2 13 ThaiLucky 9 5 · avoid 6 4 WesternLucky 7 3 12 · avoid 13

More ways in

Unlucky numbers13, 4, 17, 666 and 39, and the documented history of each.Open →Chinese zodiacTwelve animals, their lucky numbers, and the lunar new year rule.Open →NumerologyThe western system: one number from a birth date or a name.Open →

Your own numbers, not a nation's

A personal set from your birth date, renewed every morning, with the method shown.

Get today's numbers