One Extra Member

Xion takes the "XIII" out of Organization XIII.

Kid Flash: If you're called the H.I.V.E. Five... How come there are six of you?
See-More: [uncertain] 'Cause...it sounds...cooler?

— Teen Titans (2003), "Lightspeed"

Just like a person has a name (sometimes more), most groups also have a name. This name may come from different sources, such as the founder's own name, an acronym of the members' names, a random thing you just happen to see, or a random cool-sounding foreign word. One popular method is to name the team after the number of members.

We can expect that the Furious Five will have five members, and the Three Templars to have three members. After all, it's outright said in the name, right? Not always. These groups often have one extra member in them.

The reason why this one member is excluded from the team naming varies. It might be because they're supposed to be a secret member nobody is supposed to know, or that their task is different than the other members, or they're another member's twin, or it's just for the lulz, or they just signed on late and it is just too much trouble to change the name to reflect the current configuration.

A Sub-Trope to Non-Indicative Name. If applied to elements, see Element No. 5.

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Examples:

Anime and Manga

• In Beelzebub, there is the Behemoth's 34-Pillar Division... which consists of 397 members! The number 34 comes from the 10 Pillar Barons and the 24 Pillar Generals. However, the leader Jabberwock is not included in the name, and Behemoth himself is not even a part of the division.
• Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo has the Battleship Five Quartet. It has six members.
• Played for Laughs in Cromartie High School. The Four Great Ones are the supreme rulers of the second years, but they have a big problem that troubles them all: there are five of them.
• Fairy Tail:
  • One of the villainous groups is the Oración Seis ("six prayers"), made up of six very powerful wizards. There is also a seventh member, Klodoa, who is Brain's talking staff. Also depending on how you see it, Brain's Superpowered Even More Evil Side Zero may count as the eighth member. Lampshaded in the anime.
  • In the anime-only arc "Key to the Starry Skies", the Neo Oración Seis (made of up of many of the same members of the original that escaped prison) are also made up of six powerful wizards. One of these members, Jackpot, is eventually revealed to be Klodoa again, who still calls himself the Neo Oracion Seis's seventh member, which sets up The Reveal of the true sixth member of the group being the innocent and helpful Michelle Lobster, actually Imitatia.
  • The Golden Keys of the Zodiac represent and summon the twelve Celestial Spirits based on the Western Zodiac. It's later revealed there is a thirteenth key which summons Ophiuchus the Serpent Bearer, who is the most powerful of the Zodiac spirits and second in power only to the Celestial Spirit King himself.
  • In the sequel, Fairy Tail: 100 Years Quest, this applies to the Five Dragon Gods, survivors of the Dragon King Festival who hid from Acnologia and gained the strength to match him over the centuries. As it so happens, the wizard Elefseria who requested these dragons to be "sealed away" (regardless if that means killing or simply DePowering them) was hiding the existence of a sixth dragon already sealed in a labyrinth near his home. Justified when he reveals originally they were called the "Six Dragon Gods" before he killed said dragon, Earth Dragon God Dogramag, and more importantly keeping Dogramag a secret was necessary to prevent anyone from trying to enter the sealed labyrinth, itself a construct created by Dogramag's Magic Power in death that hides not only the still magically-charged Dragon God's corpse, but Elefseria's own still-beating heart that could give the possessor access to his own Law Dragon Slayer magic. Even with The Reveal Dogramag had been Faking the Dead it still counts, as only fellow Dragon God Ignia knew the truth and it helped them in their mutual Evil Plan with none the wiser.
• Naruto:
  • The "Sound Five" actually counts Sakon and Ukon as one person, instead of making it the Sound Six. The same goes for the "Sound Four," which is what the group is called after Kimimaro stops being an active member due to his illness.
  • As the name suggests, the Six Paths of Pain is a collective of six bodies representing the six Buddhist desire realms, but the vital aspect of the jutsu is the seventh path, who presides over the other six paths, and is the actual controller of the bodies.
• The only two sequel seasons in the Pretty Cure franchise, Futari wa Pretty Cure Max Heart and Yes! Pretty Cure 5 GoGo!, added a Sixth Ranger to their respective teams who weren't officially classified as Cures because it would have contradicted the headcount in the titles. ^note The "Futari" in the former refers to a pair of Lovely Angels while the latter is a Five-Man Band. Subsequent seasons would forego the numbering in the titles so they could add new Sixth Rangers during the story without hassle.
• In Rokka: Braves of the Six Flowers, the Braves of the Six Flowers are to gather at a point and go to defeat the Demon God, but seven Braves show up instead of six. This causes them to fight amongst themselves to see who the extra hero is, assuming that person must be there to sabotage them.
• Witches 5 in the third season of Sailor Moon actually has six members. However, Cyprine and Ptilol are really the same person manifesting in two different bodies, so it's justified.
• Yu-Gi-Oh!:
  • Team 5D's of Yu-Gi-Oh! 5Ds is named after their five Signer Dragons and has seven members. And a sixth Signer Dragon is revealed in a later arc.
  • Inverted in Yu-Gi-Oh! ARC-V. Despite the series' title having the Roman number V (5) in its title, the plot focuses on four dimensions, four boys with identical faces and their four dragons, and four girls with identical faces and their four bracelets. Although, to be fair, there is a fifth dimension. Its splitting apart is the reason there are 4 dimensions in the first place.
• In YuYu Hakusho, there are the Sensui Seven, with the eighth member Shinobu Sensui as the leader. The seven subordinates have the Seven Deadly Sins theme, so do Sensui's six other personalities.

Comic Books

• There have been multiple times when the Fantastic Four have had five members without changing the name or logo (even though "Fantastic Five" works just as well).
  • The Frightfoul Four were founded as the villainous counterparts of the Fantastic Four. They typically keep their traditional name, even when their line-ups either include only three members or have recruited up to five members.
• The Secret Six pull a Lampshade Hanging on this trope while filming a commercial for their services when it's pointed out that there are currently 8 of them and so the name makes no sense. Typically the team has between 6 and 7 members depending on the story arc.
• The original Seven Soldiers of Victory were Green Arrow and Speedy, Star-Spangled Kid and Stripesy, Vigilante, Shining Knight, and the Crimson Avenger and Wing. Wing, the Avenger's sidekick/chauffeur, was the "unofficial eighth soldier", even though there were two sidekicks as full members. When Green Arrow was removed from the line-up Post-Crisis, and replaced with the sidekickless Alias the Spider, Vigilante's sidekick Stuff, the Chinatown Kid was added, so Wing was still the unofficial eighth soldier. This becomes a plot point in the mid-2000s reboot when it's revealed that, just like the old team, this version of the Seven Soldiers also has an eighth member: namely, the Spider, who turns out to have been Good All Along.
• Although the original Sinister Six had six members, the all-new Sinister Six in The Superior Foes of Spider-Man consists of Boomerang, Shocker, Speed Demon, Beetle and Overdrive. The number tends to dwindle more as the story goes on.

Comic Strips

• Knights of the Dinner Table: The "Untouchable Trio" of Bob, Dave, and Brian's characters become "The Untouchable Trio (Plus One)" after Sara joins the group. This is somewhat justified in that Sara is often in the position of trying to dissuade the others from doing something stupid and/or trying to distance herself from the consequences when they do.

Films — Animation

• Kung Fu Panda is the Trope Codifier for the "signed on too late to change the name" variant. The Furious Five includes Tigress, Mantis, Viper, Crane, Monkey... and Po.
• Turning Red: Lampshaded by Ming, who asks why the Boy Band group is named 4*Town if there are five members in it.

Films — Live-Action

• Day of the Wolves: The "Wolves" call themselves Numbers 1-7, but there's an eighth robber (the man who picks the others up from the airport and flies the getaway plane) who isn't assigned a number, and never interacts with any of the others except #1.
• The Three Stooges — there were actually 6 of them (Larry, Moe, Curly, Shemp, Curly Joe, and Joe), though only 3 in any given short.

Literature

• Cradle Series: The Court of Seven has had eight members for most of its history. Adriel, the Creator, left before the Court was officially founded and thus predates the name, but eventually they were joined by Ozriel, the Reaper, bringing them to eight active members again. Shortly before the start of the series, he disappeared, but since he has now become indispensable, finding him drives most of the Abidan parts of the plot.
• In Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Harry has his name entered into the goblet without his knowledge and is subsequently picked for the Triwizard Tournament along with the goblet's three legitimate choices, who all entered their own names and are actually old enough to participate. Everyone has to go along with it because the goblet's choice is apparently binding—even though someone clearly rigged the selection by entering Harry's name under a different school, as Hogwarts already had another legitimate champion. As with a lot of the wizarding world's magic, the book doesn't go into that much detail on how the goblet itself works, but at least The Reveal at the end spells out who entered Harry's name and why.
• The Hunger Games: Panem is composed of the Capitol and the Twelve Districts. However, Katniss offhandedly mentions that there used to be District 13, which was destroyed by the Capitol during the Dark Days 74 years ago. In the second book, it's revealed that District 13 still exists, and is the centerpiece of the second rebellion.
• Overlord (2012): Played with by the group of YGGDRASIL players called "Nine's Own Goal." They originally called themselves that because they had nine members and performed suicidal actions (being an all-monster group that regularly adventured in human lands), but continued to do so even as their numbers grew. By the time they established a formal guild, they knew the name made no sense but were too attached to it to throw it out completely, so they opted to corrupt it into the meaningless "Ainz Ooal Gown", a name the protagonist later takes for himself.
• In Skulduggery Pleasant, Skulduggery tells Valkyrie about a group of sorcerers called the Four Elementals that gained a fifth member when one member married and his new wife insisted she get to join. They didn't want to change their name because there are only four elements and they worried they would lose their synchronicity if they changed it. Valkyrie thinks they should be more worried about people thinking they can't count.
• There are actually four musketeers in The Three Musketeers: d'Artagnan becomes one pretty early in the story, albeit assigned to a company different from the other three.
• The Slaughterhouse Nine in Worm will always be the Nine, no matter how few or many members there actually are at any given time. When we first see them, there are actually eight of them.

Live-Action TV

• Inverted with Blake's 7, as the titular group never had more than six human members. You had to include one or more of their sentient computers to bring the group up to seven.
• The Rowdy Three of Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency consists of four members — they were originally captured as a group of three, but Blackwing later added Vogel to their group because of his similar power set. With the addition of Amanda and Beast, they have a total of six members by the end of season 2, but still keep the name.
• Doctor Who arguably falls under this trope when counting off regenerations of the Doctor, because two of them didn't increase the sequential numbering. "Journey's End" has the Tenth Doctor regenerate into himself, and "The Name of the Doctor" reveals a previously unknown and unnumbered incarnation known as the War Doctor, who existed between the Eighth and Ninth Doctors. As a result, the Eleventh Doctor was on his twelfth face and thirteenth life. The Doctor continues regenerating and reaches the Thirteenth Doctor, and this is where things get very messy. An unrecognizable new incarnation who claims to be from the Doctor's past appears, called the Fugitive Doctor, and then the story of the Timeless Child is unveiled in "The Timeless Children" and may signify an indiscriminate amount of past lives predating the First Doctor have existed. Then there's the anomalies like the Watcher and the Valeyard and the Meta-Crisis Tenth Doctor from the aforementioned "Journey's End", as well as an unseen incarnation who was impersonating Merlin. Finally, we have an apparent incarnation awaiting the Doctor's life in the far future called the Curator, a retired Doctor with the face of his fourth incarnation, only elderly, first seen in the 50th anniversary special, "The Day of the Doctor". Word of God justifies the retroactive presence of these unnumbered incarnations and the lack of change to the numbering of the already numbered incarnations by saying that numbering the Doctor's incarnations is an out of universe convention and the Doctor themself does not use numbers to label their incarnations.
• Although Kamen Rider hasn't used numbers in team names, the series has twice made a big deal of villain groups with a specific number of members, only to reveal additional members later:
  • Kamen Rider Blade has 52 Undead, each one corresponding to a playing card rank. Unfortunately, the Joker - or rather, multiple Jokers - are also in play.
  • In Kamen Rider Drive, the villains are Roidmudes numbered from one to 108. One of the key players in the conflict is No. 000, the Roidmude prototype.
• On The Late Show with David Letterman's "Small Town News" segment, one of Dave's self-described favorite categories of news is things like "Classical Trio performs" with a picture of 4-6 members.
• Uchu Sentai Kyuranger: "Kyu" can have multiple meanings in context, but one of them is "nine" and the team originally had nine members. When the team's commander becomes a Ranger himself, he tries to update the team name to ten as "Jyuranger" but the rest of the team shoots him down (as a Mythology Gag to the fact that that name was taken already). By the end of the show, the "Ninerangers" have twelve members.

Music

• The Cocteau Twins were, for most of their existence, actually a trio (none of whom were named Cocteau).
• Canada's Five Man Electrical Band (of "Signs" fame) did indeed start off as a quintet in 1969, became a trio then a duo as members left, then expanded to a sextet in the 1980s.
• Inverted by Day6. Despite originally having six members, they’ve spent the vast majority of their career with five members. When Jae left in 2021, Day6 now consists of four members.
• Inverted by Ben Folds Five, a group with 3 members.
• Irish rock band The 4 of Us had five members at some points in its history.
• Since 2014, the pop band Maroon 5 has had 6 members, and even briefly served as a seven-piece band from 2016 to 2020.
• Late 60s pop band The New Colony Six was a sextet for their first three albums, but expanded to a septet for their final LP, without changing their name.
• Run–D.M.C. consisted of Run, DMC, and Jam Master Jay.
• The Grammy Award-winning Girl Group Salt-n-Pepa consisted of Salt, Pepa, and DJ Spindarella.
• Late 30s band the Raymond Scott Quintette had six members. (Scott apparently didn't count himself.)
• Thompson Twins, a British New Wave pop band, had three members at the height of their success, and as many as seven in some years. They did slim down to a duo (neither of whom were named Thompson, and neither of whom were twins) for their final three albums.

Mythology and Religion

• The Four Gods in Chinese Mythology actually has five divine beasts. The fifth one is Huang Long, the Yellow Dragon that governs the element of Earth and the direction of center. He's absent in the Japanese version, where the center is associated with void instead.

Professional Wrestling

• While on TNA Impact, Ric Flair decided to form a group in the vein of the Four Horsemen out of the TNA guys called Fourtune. Thing was, there were six members... eventually they renamed the group Fortune.

Radio

• Opie & Anthony: And Jim Norton, who's been an official co-star of the show since 2002, but he's cool with the name staying The Opie & Anthony Show.

Sports

• When the Big Ten Conference of the NCAA added Penn State as a member in the 1990s, they became a group of 11 schools rather than 10 (the logo they adopted after Penn State joined acknowledged this with an "11" hidden in the negative space under the arms of the T in "Ten"). The University of Nebraska became their 12th member in 2011, and in 2014 it expanded further with Rutgers and the University of Maryland—but they are still called the Big Ten.
  • And the Big 12 Conference currently has... 10 member schools. However, the Big 12 was founded by 12 schools, and stayed at that number before Colorado and Nebraska left in 2011 to join the Pac-12 and Big 10 conferences respectively, followed by Missouri leaving the Big 12 for the SEC in 2012. The Big 12's predecessor, the Big 8 Conference, consisted of eight members (Colorado, Iowa State, Kansas, Kansas State, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Oklahoma State) before 4 Southwest Conference members joined the Big 8 to form the Big 12.
  • The Atlantic 10 Conference has an ever-changing number of teams other than ten. ^note  Since 1991, it has had (in order) 9, 8, 9, 12, 11, 12, 14, 16, 13, and 14 members.
  • The Pac-12 Conference is an aversion, as it's able to change its name whenever it gets new members. It was the first the Pacific-8 when it only consisted of schools in California, Oregon, and Washington, changed to Pacific-10 upon getting Arizona and Arizona State, and changed to its current moniker (officially replacing "Pacific" with "Pac") with the additions of the University of Colorado and the University of Utah in 2011.

Video Games

• The Septentriones (septem = seven) in Devil Survivor 2. There are eight of them. The eighth one, Alcor, is the only one not presented as a mindless abomination. He is the true identity of the Anguished One. He is the one that created Nicaea so that humanity can fight their fate of being erased from existence. In one of the routes, he even becomes a party member. In the Updated Re-release's new scenario, the Triangulum likewise have four members, with the fourth, Cor Caroli, turning against her fellows and creator to protect mankind.
• In EarthBound (1994), the Runaway Five apparently consists of six members onstage, though there are only five of them when you speak with them backstage. Averted in the original Japanese, where they were the non-numerical Tonzura Brothers.
• Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker's "Myths of the Realm" questline has you investigate the local pantheon known as The Twelve, which is revealed after several quests to have contained one more member than their name would imply — in addition to the twelve named deities the various characters have been mentioning for five expansion packs, there is one more unnamed deity, charged with standing an eternal watch over something.
• Fire Emblem: Three Houses is full of this trope. First of all, even though its (English) title is "Three Houses", there are clearly four factions and endings in the game, the fourth being The Church of Seiros; and even if you don't count them as a "house" (a term reserved for student dorms in the setting), the DLC adds an actual fourth House to the game, bringing the total faction count to five. Next, the Church venerates the Four Saints... but its founder Seiros is likewise canonized as a Saint but never counted with the other four. Lastly, Marianne's Paralogue reveals that the historical Ten Elites should have been properly called Eleven Elites, but Maurice, the eleventh member and Marianne's ancestor, went mad with bloodlust, turned into a giant monster, and was erased from history.
• Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days introduces Xion, the fourteenth member of Organization XIII. She isn't actually a member, just a spare/backup for the powers of the thirteenth member. She's not even a Nobody, just a manifestation of Sora's memories, and was meant to be a mindless “puppet” instead of an actual person. By the end of the game, she was Ret-Gone'd from everyone's memories.
• In The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, the Gerudo race has a folk legend revolving around The Seven Heroines of Gerudo, who protected the city in distant past and are commemorated with seven statues built somewhere at the edge of Gerudo Desert. However, there was in fact an eighth heroine, whose statue was mysteriously built far from the other seven and said heroine accordingly is less known. In The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, there's a side quest that revolves around these heroines, and eventually the reason why the eighth heroine is "excluded" is discovered: said eighth heroine actually was a man, who, despite his aid towards the seven, was still barred from Gerudo City out of tradition where no male may enter the all-female city.
• Megadimension Neptunia VII: The Gold Third actually consist of four members: C-Sha, B-Sha, S-Sha, and K-Sha. And if you count E-Sha (who represents the "Enix" part of Square-Enix and is the one their body actually belongs to even if she lets S-Sha stay in the driver's seat most of the time), they're actually five.
• Famously in Pokémon with the Elite Four. In the original release, the player completed the gauntlet only to have a fifth sequential battle with their rival at the end. In every following generation, they're still referred to as the Elite Four though the title excludes the League Champion, whom the player will face immediately after.
• Wild ARMs 4 has an organisation known as Brionac, also called "Lambda's Elite 11". However, at least three more people are trusted enough to attend its meetings and take orders from its leader. Moreover, one of the official members is long dead, but the "Elite 11" name is still used. It makes the group both too small and too large for its name.

Western Animation

• The Popeye episode "Jeopardy Sheriff" in which Popeye starts to read Swee'Pee the story of the Three Bears: Moe, Sam, Lefty, and George. Also referred to as "The three bears of which there were four."
• The Hive Five in Teen Titans have six members by their second appearance. Lampshaded by Kid Flash. It was probably a good thing for them that Jinx quit.

Real Life

• The Pleiades Star Cluster are named after the seven Pleiades sisters from Classical Mythology. However, there are actually nine bright stars in the cluster (the other two are named after their parents, Atlas and Pleione). What's more, the star Sterope is actually two close stars sharing the same name. Finally, a look through even a low-power telescope shows way more than 7 stars. Given the motion of stars over time, it's possible that the Greeks actually did see seven "stars" when they first named it.
• This was initially averted by the cluster of cities on the Mississippi River initially known as the Tri-Cities in the late 19th century, as Davenport (Iowa), Moline, and Rock Island (both in Illinois) were about equal size to each other and when East Moline, IL grew in the 1930s they renamed themselves the Quad Cities. Then in the 1950s it was played straight when Bettendorf, Iowa's population exploded, surpassing that of East Moline and a debate rose as to whether Bettendorf had replaced East Moline in the hierarchy or whether they should be renamed the "Quint Cities". They eventually settled on a compromise where they remain known as the Quad Cities but include Bettendorf as the fifth member.
• The Japanese three grand soups, a list of the three greatest kinds of soup in the world, has four entries. Reportedly, this is because the last two contenders are tied for third place.

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