USA HISTORY

Detailed explanation-1: -Lincoln’s address starts with “Four score and seven years ago.” A score is equal to 20 years, so he was referencing 87 years ago-1776, when the Declaration of Independence was signed.

Detailed explanation-2: -According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it’s “presumably from the practice, in counting sheep or large herds of cattle, of counting orally from 1 to 20, and making a score or notch on a stick, before proceeding to count the next 20.” The first citation for that use of the word score in the OED is in the year 1100.

Detailed explanation-3: -A ‘score’ is a group of 20 (often used in combination with a cardinal number, i.e. fourscore to mean 80), but also often used as an indefinite number (e.g. the newspaper headline “Scores of Typhoon Survivors Flown to Manila").

Detailed explanation-4: -(archaic) hundred Fivescore years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. ( Martin Luther King Jr., 1963, I have a dream)