There will never, ever be a OnePlus 4 - because releasing it literally means death!

If you are at all interested in OnePlus' powerful and affordable phones, you may have seen the upcoming sequel to last year's OnePlus 3 and 3T models being referred to as the OnePlus 5. The straight-up number skipping may seem odd, as it's counter-intuitive and it isn't something phone makers do very often.

But it's not like a giant black hole opened and swallowed the OnePlus 4, compressing the fabric of space and time as to give us the OnePlus 5 a year in advance. The actual truth is even more sinister! If 1+ made a OnePlus 4, the phone might as well be called the OnePlus Death - in China and most of East Asia. Quite a marketing zing to it, huh? Imagine the looks you'd get for going to buy that from China Telecom, if they ever stocked it in the first place!

Like many other brands selling their products in the East, OnePlus has to get around a peculiar superstition. In China, pronouncing the number 4 sounds almost exactly like the words "death" and "disease", producing an unpleasant association. Understandably, the Chinese and other East Asian nations restrain themselves from using the number as much as possible, which results in some rather otherworldly practices.

Some buildings in East Asia have no fourth floor and omit the cursed number from the rest of the floors – including the entire 40-49 set. You literally cannot get there because the elevator controls skip the numbers. Same goes for street addresses (try navigating!) and pretty much everything else, except military designations.