The Notable Numeral
"Wait, if you're the H.I.V.E. Five, why are there six of you?"—Kid Flash, Teen Titans
If you have a group of people banding together to fight evil, or to cause it, then it's good to have a good team name that people will remember. If you can't think of anything else, then why not name yourself after the number of members you have, plus a nice adjective that describes you? Maybe try to tie it together in a pun or something.
In the end, what do you have? Why, The Notable Numeral, of course!
This naming convention is popular in Real Life to describe people who make the news as a group, usually as either the victims of a crime or as the people arrested for a crime (often in historic/sensational cases of people who are believed to be wrongly accused, whose case seems to represent a broader issue or who grab the public's attention in some other way), such as the Buffalo Six and the West Memphis Three. The Other Wiki calls these "Enumerated defendants." Describing a single such defendant, usually fictional, as the something-or-other One is a Stock Parody.
Beware, if excess alliteration disturbs you, then it might be best to look elsewhere.
See also The Adjectival Superhero, where the adjective describes a person or team instead of a number. Can cross with Superhero Sobriquets if it's a nickname and not the team's proper name.
- My Hero Zero
- The Chosen One
- The Dynamic Duo
- The Dynamite Duo from "Dynamite Magazine"
- The Ambiguously Gay Duo.
- The Gruesome Twosome
- The Dirty Pair
- The Odd Couple
- The Onibaku Duo
- The Amazing Three
- Kishou Sentai Weather Three
- The Power Trio
- The Freudian Trio
- The Terrible Trio, and namesake trope
- The "Untouchable Trio" (plus one) of the Knights of the Dinner Table.
- The Three Musketeers
- The Big Four
- The Elite Four (a.k.a. The Shitennō, which translates to Four Heavenly Kings.)
- The Fab Four
- "The Fearsome Foursome!"
- The Fantastic Four
- The Frightful Four, a group of Fantastic Four villains.
- The Four, the Alternate Company Equivalent and Evil Counterpart Fantastic Four from Planetary.
- Genius 4
- The Pre-Fab Four
- The Civic-Minded Five
- In sports, Michigan basketball's Fab Five.
- The Famous Five. Who were a bunch of Canadian feminist icons; sadly, they aren't that famous.
- The Famous Five and The Secret Seven, child detectives in two series by Enid Blyton.
- The Fatal Five.
- The Fearsome Five
- The Femme Five, of which there are seven. ("Traditional counting is an oppressive patriarchal tool.")
- The Other Fearsome Five
- The Fearless Five
- The "Final Five" and "Significant Seven" Cylons.
- Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five
- The Other Furious Five
- The Jackson Five (or 5ive?)
- Dynamo 5
- Dai Sentai Goggle Five, Chikyuu Sentai Fiveman and Rescue Sentai Go Go Five.
- Is there another team of five we should know about? Say, one that blends these series' Sentai sensibilities with the Magical Girl genre?
- Fox Force Five - "Fox as in we're a bunch of foxy chicks. Force as in we're a force to be reckoned with. Five as there's one, two, three, four, five of us."
- The Runaway Five (which apparently actually contains six people)
- The Bionic Six.
- The Oceanic Six
- The Secret Six from DC Comics.
- The Sinister Six
- Blakes Seven.
- The Sinister Seven from the NES game. Subverted, since it's never said who they really are.
- The eponymous Killer7.
- Koi Koi 7 (though there are only six of them)
- The Magnificent Seven.
- The 8 Gang.
- The Great Ten, a China-based team of DC super heroes.
- The Terrible Ten, a series of short films in the 1940's and 50's
- Ocean's Eleven, Twelve, and Thirteen.
- The Dirty Dozen.
- Organization XIII
- For an example of the trope applied to victims of crime, Being Human (UK) has the "Box Tunnel 20"
- The Crazy 88. Probably a subversion, since there aren't 88 of them. They just thought it sounded cool.
- 108 Righteous Bandits, a Chinese gang in Deadlands. There isn't exactly 108 of them, they chose the name because it features heavily in Buddhist mysticism.