Eighty-eight reduces to sixteen and then seven, but its chief significance is Chinese and phonetic. The word for eight, ba, sounds close to fa, to prosper, so eight is the most auspicious of numbers in Chinese culture, and the doubled eight of eighty-eight intensifies the good fortune; it is sought in phone numbers, addresses and licence plates, and the written character resembles the character for double happiness. The number is a byword for wealth and prosperity across the Chinese-speaking world, one of the clearest cases of a number's meaning arising from the sound of the word rather than from any count.
In chemistry, eighty-eight is the atomic number of radium, discovered in 1898 by Marie and Pierre Curie, from the Latin radius, ray, for its intense radioactivity; its use in glow-in-the-dark watch dials later caused the well-documented poisonings of the factory workers, remembered as the radium girls, who painted them through the 1920s.
The whole apparatus of digit-reduction numerology is a twentieth-century invention rather than an inheritance from antiquity. Mrs. L. Dow Balliett published the first systematic version, The Philosophy of Numbers, in 1908, fixing the letter-to-number chart still used today and ruling that eleven and twenty-two must stand as master numbers rather than reduce further; her colleague, the physician Julia Seton, is credited with coining the word numerology itself around 1912.