Abjad calculator

How it works

The twenty-eight Arabic letters carry fixed numbers in the abjad sequence — abjad hawwaz huttī kalaman — running 1 to 9, then 10 to 90, then 100 to 1000. The value of a name is the sum of its letters. محمد is 40 + 8 + 40 + 4 = 92. علی is 70 + 30 + 10 = 110. الله is 66.

Where it stops being arithmetic

The abjad sequence is older than the Urdu alphabet. Urdu added letters Arabic does not have — ٹ ڈ ڑ ژ چ پ گ ں ھ ے — and each is mapped to its nearest Arabic parent. Those mappings are a convention, not a rule, and practitioners genuinely differ: some count ں as 50 like a plain nūn, others as 0; ھ is 5 in most systems and 0 in others.

This calculator uses the mappings most commonly used here, and — more usefully — it prints the value it gave every single letter. If your system differs, you can see exactly which letter and by how much, rather than arguing with a number.

The full table

The twenty-eight, straight from the same data the calculator uses:

Urdu and Persian additions, and the orthographic variants, with the parent they take their value from:

The reductions

• Abjad kabir — the full total, untouched.
• Mod 9 — the "small" number used for most name work. A multiple of nine gives 9 rather than 0.
• Mod 12 — for the systems that map a name onto the zodiac.
• Mod 7 — for the systems that map onto the days of the week.