Eight is the number that comes after seven and before nine. It's written as 8 or VIII in Roman numerals. When you count on your fingers, eight means all your fingers except two, or you could think of it as two groups of four.

The number eight appears everywhere in daily life. An octopus has eight arms. A stop sign has eight sides, making it an octagon. Spider legs? Eight of them. In music, an octave spans eight notes on the scale. There are eight fluid ounces in a cup, and if you're learning to play chess, you'll find eight rows and eight columns on the board, making 64 squares total.

In mathematics, eight is special because it's a perfect cube: 2 × 2 × 2 equals 8. It's also a power of two, which makes it important in computer science, where information is organized in groups of eight bits called bytes.