The basic prayers of the Rosary are from scripture. The standard Rosary is a circle of 5 decades or 50 small beads punctuated with 4 larger beads. There is a pendant of two large and three small beads ending in a cross. The smaller beads on the rosary are the Ave's or 'Hail Marys' and the larger are called Pater Nosters or the 'Our Fathers'.

Church historians also call it the Dominican Rosary, the Marian Rosary, and the "Vita Christi" or "Life of Christ Rosary", to distinguish it from other Roman Catholic bead-prayers

The Holy Rosary is closely associated with Saint Dominic de Guzmán (1170-1221 AD), the Spaniard who founded of the Order of Preachers, better known as the Dominicans. From the fifteenth century forward the Dominicans were the foremost promoters of the Rosary. Recent scholarship suggests, however, that the first groups to combine the repetition of the Hail Mary with the contemplation of Mysteries were other religious orders in Prussia around 1300 AD

Over the next 250 years the devotion spread across Europe, reaching the laity via voluntary confraternities and rosary picture-books. There were numerous competing versions, advocating as few as five Mysteries and as many as 200. The matter was not settled until 1569. In that year St. Pope Pius V, himself a Dominican, issued an apostolic letter establishing the fifteen-Mystery form of the Holy Rosary as the official, Church-authorized version. This was the format in use for the next four centuries. In the year 2002, Pope John Paul II published an apostolic letter that added five more "Luminous" Mysteries, making a total of twenty authorized Mysteries.

The Church celebrates the feast of Our Lady of the Rosary on October 7. This commemorates the day in 1571 when Christian forces defeated the Turkish/Moslem fleet in a sea battle at Lepanto, off the western coast of Greece. St. Pope Pius V had asked all Christians to pray the Rosary for victory.

About the Prayer Itself

In essence the Rosary is a prayerful Scriptural meditation, since the Our Father is Jesus' own prayer given to his disciples when they had asked him how they should pray (Matt 6:9-13). The first part of the Hail Mary is also Scriptural, being a compilation of part of the dialogue between Mary and the Angel Gabriel at the Annunciation (Lk 1:28), combined with the exclamation made by Elizabeth during the Visitation (Lk 1:42). In fact the prayer was originally known as the 'Angelic salutation' (greeting), with Elizabeth's greeting only being added generally during the medieval period.

The second part of the Hail Mary, the intercessory prayer to Mary, seems to date from about the eleventh century and was gradually adopted by the Church in general, with the whole prayer being finally fixed in its present form during the sixteenth century.

JOYOUS MYSTERIES 
(Annunciation , Visitation , Nativity , Presentation , Finding Jesus in the Temple) 

SORROWFUL MYSTERIES
(Agony in the Garden , Scourging , Crown with Thorns , Carrying the Cross , Crucifixion)

GLORIOUS MYSTERIES 
(Resurrection , Ascension , Pentecost , Assumption , Coronation of Mary as Queen of Heaven)