From the history of dice notation.

Someone would yell out a number range (“7-34”), and the winner was the first person who could come up with a way to generate that range with dice (3d10+4). They could get convoluted (e.g., 1-26 = 2d8 + 1d12 -2).

Yeah, I can’t stand those “number ranges”. I’m not very good at them. My method is “it’s probably Nd4”, like if it says 3–12, I check if it fits a bunch of d4 and in that case it does. Just wish it’d use dice notation honestly.