Fifty-five is five times eleven and reduces to ten and then one. Its interest is chiefly mathematical: it is a triangular number, the sum of the integers one through ten, and it is a term in the Fibonacci sequence, the tenth, following thirty-four and preceding eighty-nine, one of the relatively few numbers that are both, which recreational mathematics notes with pleasure. The doubled five gives it, in numerological reading, an intensified quality of change and freedom before its reduction through ten to the unity of one.
Fifty-five falls outside Cheiro's original 1926 compound-number scheme, which stops at fifty-two, so no reading attributed to his book is reported here; Balliett's 1908 chart reduces it instead to one, by way of ten, initiative and new beginnings in the standard modern keyword list, a root shared with nineteen and thirty-seven and read, in the standard American chart, as the doubled five of change resolving into a single decisive direction. In chemistry, fifty-five is the atomic number of cesium, the element whose atomic vibrations define the modern second: the International System of Units has fixed the second, since 1967, as a specific count of oscillations of the cesium-133 atom, making this number's namesake element the literal basis of precise timekeeping worldwide.