Numerals around the world

Published Juli 2, 2026 · By NumberWiki

Category Numeral systems

The digits 0–9 you're reading aren't the only living decimal numerals. More than a billion people write numbers every day in Devanagari, Arabic, Thai, Bengali, Tamil, and other scripts. These are the same base-10 place-value system we use — only the shapes of the ten digits differ. They are, quite literally, our digits' cousins.

One system, many glyphs

Almost every modern numeral script descends from the Brahmi numerals of ancient India, where the place-value system with a true zero took its mature form around the middle of the first millennium CE. From there it branched two ways: eastward and southward into the scripts of South and Southeast Asia, and westward through Arabic into Europe — which is why the digits in this paragraph and the digits on an Indian banknote are siblings, not strangers.

Because they all share the place-value design, the arithmetic is identical: each position is worth ten times the one to its right, and a zero glyph holds an empty place. Only the ten symbols change. Today every one of these scripts coexists with the Western "Arabic" digits, used interchangeably depending on context, language, and formality.

"Arabic" numerals, East and West

A point of frequent confusion: the digits 0–9 used across Europe and the Americas are called Western Arabic (or Hindu-Arabic) numerals, because Europe learned them from the medieval Arab world. But the Arabic-speaking world itself largely writes Eastern Arabic numerals — ٠ ١ ٢ ٣ ٤ ٥ ٦ ٧ ٨ ٩ — a visually distinct set. Both are "Arabic numerals"; they simply diverged into eastern and western forms. Even within the Eastern set there are regional variants (the Persian and Urdu forms of 4, 5, and 6 differ from the standard Arabic ones).

The digits 0–9 in each script

Each row shows that script's ten digits, in order from 0 to 9.

A quick tour

• Eastern Arabic — used for Arabic, Persian (Farsi), and Urdu. Although Arabic text runs right-to-left, multi-digit numbers are written left-to-right, just like ours.
• Devanagari — the script of Hindi, Marathi, Nepali, and Sanskrit; its digits appear on Indian currency and signage.
• Bengali — used for Bengali and Assamese, the numerals of eastern India and Bangladesh.
• Tamil — one of the oldest living scripts; classical Tamil also had separate signs for 10, 100, and 1000, though the place-value digits are standard today.
• Thai — Thai digits share the page with Western ones across Thailand; official documents often prefer the Thai forms.
• Tibetan — used for Tibetan and Dzongkha across the Himalayan plateau.
• Khmer — the numerals of Cambodia; the Khmer zero is among the candidates for the oldest dated written zero (a 7th-century inscription).
• Lao — closely related to Thai, used in Laos.
• Burmese — the numerals of Myanmar, with their distinctive rounded forms.

The same numbers across the scripts

A few numbers rendered in all nine scripts. Each heading number links to its page; the order matches the table above (Eastern Arabic, Devanagari, Bengali, Tamil, Thai, Tibetan, Khmer, Lao, Burmese).

On this site

Every number page on NumberWiki shows its value in all nine of these scripts, in the "In other modern scripts" strip of the Historical numeral systems section — so you can look up any number and read it in Devanagari, Thai, or Eastern Arabic at a glance.

Further reading

• Georges Ifrah, The Universal History of Numbers (Wiley, 2000) — the broad sweep from Brahmi numerals to the world's modern scripts.
• Stephen Chrisomalis, Numerical Notation: A Comparative History (Cambridge University Press, 2010).
• The Unicode Standard — each script's digits occupy a contiguous block (e.g. Devanagari U+0966–U+096F, Thai U+0E50–U+0E59).

See also

• Roman numerals · Greek numerals · Chinese numerals
• Babylonian numerals · Egyptian numerals · Mayan numerals
• 0 — the digit, invented in India, that made all these place-value systems possible.