Forty-four is four times eleven and reduces to eight. In modern numerology it draws attention as a repeated digit, and some popular writers treat it as an unofficial master number alongside eleven, twenty-two and thirty-three, reading it as a number of great material building and disciplined power, a claim that is contested even within the numerological literature, where the recognised master numbers are conventionally only the three doublings up to thirty-three. Older traditions did not develop forty-four, so its status as a master number is a recent and disputed extension rather than an established doctrine.
Cheiro's 1926 Book of Numbers assigns forty-four the reading already given to twenty-six, the two sharing a digital root of eight; the pairing means Cheiro's own scheme reads the doubled four of forty-four not through any special repeated-digit significance but through the same root twenty-six and thirty-five already carry above, which sits uneasily beside the popular modern treatment of forty-four as an unofficial master number, a status Cheiro's own 1926 text gives no indication of recognising. In chemistry, unrelated to any numerological reading, forty-four is the atomic number of ruthenium, an element named for Ruthenia, the Latin name for the region where it was first isolated, in the Ural Mountains, in 1844 by the chemist Karl Ernst Claus.