Cyrillic numerals

Cyrillic numerals are the Slavic system of alphabet numerals writing that was based on the Cyrillic alphabet. This system was used by Slavic people of the Eastern and Southern Europe. This system was also used in Russia till 1700 until it was substituted by the Arabic numerals. Nowadays Cyrillic system is used in some church books written in the Old Slavonic language.

The graphemes of Cyrillic letters are used as numerals. The separate letter corresponds to the certain numeral from 1 to 9, to the certain ten from 10 to 90 and to certain hundred from 100 to 900. The numerals were written and pronounced from the left to the right besides numerals from 11 to 19. To tell numerals from letters there was the special sign over the letters with the numeral meaning that was named diacritic. But this sign was used not only for the numerals indication but also for making the words shorter during writing. In fact it was the analogue of the line that was drawn by Romans over their numerals during writing that also helped to indicate the numerals in the text.

If it was necessary to write down the numeral bigger than 1000 it was written with the help of the necessary number of signs that meant one thousand that was ҂.

The Glagolitic notation was built according to the same principles but with the difference that the letters of Glagolitic alphabet were used.

In the beginning of 18th century the mixed system of numerals writing was used. It consisted of the Cyrillic numerals and Arabic numerals. For example, some ancient coins of the Eastern Europe have the face 17K1 that means the numeral 1721. In this example we see the numerals of both systems.