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
Hindu–Arabic numeral system zero. In China, Gautama Siddha introduced Hindu numerals with zero in 718, but Chinese mathematicians did not find them useful, as they had already had the decimal positional counting rods. In Chinese numerals, a circle (〇) is used to write zero in Suzhou numerals. Many historians think it was imported from Indian numerals by Gautama Siddha in 718, but some Chinese scholars think it was created from the Chinese text space filler "□". Chinese and Japanese finally adopted the Hindu–Arabic numerals in the 19th century, abandoning counting rods. The "Western Arabic" numerals as they were in common use in Europe