X-Nico

2 unusual facts about Arabic numerals


European numerals

Arabic numerals, the most commonly recognised numeral system, consisting of digits 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9

St James' Priory, Bristol

The sundial is a block of Bath stone carved with hour lines and medieval Arabic numerals in a style that suggests it was probably made in the 15th century.


Alexander of Villedieu

The poem is not very long, only a few hundred lines, and summarizes the art of calculating with the new style of Indian dice, or Talibus Indorum, as he calls the new Hindu-Arabic numerals.

Hindu–Arabic numeral system

the widespread Western "Arabic numerals" used with the Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek alphabets in the table below labelled "European", descended from the "West Arabic numerals" which were developed in al-Andalus and the Maghreb (There are two typographic styles for rendering European numerals, known as lining figures and text figures).

Part number

Today's advanced state of optical character recognition (OCR) technology also means that machines can often read the human-readable format of Arabic numerals and Latin script.

Shea Zellweger

Roman Numerals (I, II, III) were cumbersome to use and only maintained a dominant role in arithmetic until 1202, when Leonardo Fibonacci in his work Liber Abaci, demonstrated that calculations with Hindu-Arabic numerals (1, 2, 3) were far more efficient.


see also

Danish language

Similar constructions are found in German, Dutch, Afrikaans, certain varieties of Norwegian, Slovene and Arabic as well as in archaic and dialect English (compare the line "Four-and-twenty blackbirds" in the old nursery rhyme.)