Arabic numerals Libya to Morocco. Arabs, on the other hand, call the base-10 system (not just these digits) "Hindu numerals", referring to their origin in India. This is not to be confused with what the Arabs call the "Hindi numerals", namely the Eastern Arabic numerals ( - - - - - - - - - ) used in the Middle East, or any of the numerals currently used in Indian languages (e.g. Devanagari: ). The European acceptance of the numerals was accelerated by the invention of the printing press, and they became widely known during the 15th century. Early evidence of their
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