Reification of numbers! / Liczebniki rzeczownikowe!

JEDZIE ÓSEMKA!

"Bunches" (grona, like of grapes) of people hanging off the trams on Warsaw's Poniatowski bridge after the war.

Źródło: Wikimedia Commons, własność publiczna.

REIFIED NUMERALS

We used these reified numerals to refer to the different chocolate samples, instead of calling them by their brand names, since it was supposed to be a blind test. Reification means to make something abstract concrete -- in this case, making a number into a noun referring to a specific thing. 

It is like when in English we call buses by their names:"I just missed the 212."

These numbers, when reified, become nouns, and so decline as nouns. This is why we put trójka in the dative in this sentence, since it was the indirect object: "Ile punktów Pani daje trójce?" ("How many points do you give [number] three?"

jedynka = one
dwójka = two
trójka = three
czwórka = four
piątka = five
szóstka = six
siódemka = seven
ósemka = eight
dziewiątka = nine
dziesiątka = ten
jedenastka = eleven