A score is twenty, so threescore is sixty and three score and ten is seventy. The phrase means a human lifespan of seventy years, and it comes from Psalm 90:10, which the King James Version of 1611 renders as “The days of our years are threescore years and ten”. Score as a word for twenty is far older than that verse, and in modern English it survives mainly here and in the fourscore of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘Three score and ten’?
Threescore used to be used for sixty, in the way that we still use a dozen for twelve, and (occasionally) score for twenty.
Score means twenty because of how people once counted. Etymonline traces it to late Old English scoru and to Old Norse skor, a mark or notch, and explains the method behind it: “The notion probably is of counting large numbers (of a passing flock of sheep, etc.) by making a notch in a stick for each 20.” On that account one notch stood for twenty animals, and the notch gave its name to the number. So the arithmetic of the phrase is three twenties plus ten, which is seventy.
The use of threescore as a name for sixty has long since died out but is still remembered in this phrase. Threescore goes back to at least 1388, as in this from John Wyclif’s Bible, Leviticus 12, at that date:
“Thre scoor and sixe daies.”
The verse is Leviticus 12:5, and the Wycliffe text on Wikisource gives the whole clause as “thre scoor and sixe daies sche schal dwelle in the blood of her clensyng”. Threescore was a plain numeral at that date rather than an antique flourish. Etymonline dates its companion fourscore, eighty, to the mid 13th century, notes that “Middle English also had threescore ‘sixty,’ etc.”, and calls the form archaic only by the time Lincoln used it at Gettysburg in 1863.
There are numerous uses of ‘threescore’ in the Bible. Most of them refer to its simple meaning as the number sixty, for example:
“…threescore and ten bullocks, an hundred rams, and two hundred lambs: all these were for a burnt offering to the Lord.”
That is 2 Chronicles 29:32, and there the sum is doing no work beyond counting: threescore and ten bullocks means seventy of them.
There is a use of it that refers to the span of our lives, in Psalms 90:
The days of our years are threescore years and ten;
and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years,
yet is their strength labor and sorrow;
for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.
That is Psalm 90:10, and the fourscore in the second line is eighty, the outside figure allowed for a life of unusual strength. The reckoning is older in English than the King James Version. The 1599 Geneva Bible, the translation most English readers knew before it, already has “The time of our life is threescore years and ten, and if they be of strength, fourscore years”. The King James wording is the one that stuck, and seventy has been the notional allowance ever since, the figure against which reaching a ripe old age is measured.
As with many other Biblical phrases, this was picked up by Shakespeare. In Macbeth, 1605, we have:
Threescore and ten I can remember well:
Within the volume of which time I have seen
Hours dreadful and things strange; but this sore night
Hath trifled former knowings.
The speaker is the Old Man in Act 2, Scene 4, talking with Ross outside Macbeth’s castle on the morning after Duncan’s murder; the Folger Shakespeare text opens his speech “Threescore and ten I can remember well”. Nothing in his seventy years of memory matches the night just gone.
It’s an odd fact that, although Shakespeare took numerous phrases and examples of imagery from the Bible, the word Bible doesn’t appear in any of his plays.