Indian numerals Indian numerals Indian numerals are the symbols representing numbers in India. These numerals are used in the context of the decimal Hindu–Arabic numeral system, and are distinct from, though related by descent to Arabic numerals. Below is a list of the Indian numerals in their modern Devanagari form, the corresponding Western Arabic equivalents, their Hindi and Sanskrit pronunciation, and translations in some languages. Since Sanskrit is an Indo-European language, the words for numerals closely resemble those of Greek and Latin. The word "Shunya" for zero was translated into Arabic as "صفر" "sifr", meaning 'nothing' which became the term "zero" in
Chinese numerals "per se". Since it reflects spoken language, it does not use the positional system as in Arabic numerals, in the same way that spelling out numbers in English does not. There are characters representing the numbers zero through nine, and other characters representing larger numbers such as tens, hundreds, thousands and so on. There are two sets of characters for Chinese numerals: one for everyday writing, known as "xiǎoxiě" (), and one for use in commercial or financial contexts, known as "dàxiě" (). The latter arose because the characters used for writing numerals are geometrically simple, so simply using those