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
Arabic not have the Arabic script as an optional feature. As a result, Arabic speaking users communicated in these technologies by transliterating the Arabic text using the Latin script, sometimes known as IM Arabic. To handle those Arabic letters that cannot be accurately represented using the Latin script, numerals and other characters were appropriated. For example, the numeral "3" may be used to represent the Arabic letter . There is no universal name for this type of transliteration, but some have named it Arabic Chat Alphabet. Other systems of transliteration exist, such as using dots or capitalization to represent the "emphatic"