Counting Rod Numerals

Counting Rod Numerals is a Unicode block containing traditional Chinese counting rod symbols, which mathematicians used for calculation in ancient China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. The orientation of the Unicode characters follows Song dynasty convention, with digits represented as horizontal lines, and tens represented as vertical lines, which differs from Han dynasty practice which represented digits as vertical lines, and tens as horizontal lines.^[3]

Counting Rod Numerals
Range	U+1D360..U+1D37F (32 code points)
Plane	SMP
Scripts	Common
Symbol sets	Counting rod numbers; East Asian tally marks; European tally marks
Assigned	25 code points
Unused	7 reserved code points
Unicode version history
5.0 (2006)	18 (+18)
11.0 (2018)	25 (+7)
Unicode documentation
Code chart ∣ Web page
Note: [1][2]

The block also contains five ideographic tally marks, based on the five strokes of the character 正, which are widely used in East Asia. There are also two characters for use in representing traditional European tally marks (only Tally Mark One and Tally Mark Five are encoded, with tally numbers two through four intended to be represented as a sequence of two through four Tally Mark One characters).

Block

Counting Rod Numerals[1][2] Official Unicode Consortium code chart (PDF)

0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

A

B

C

D

E

F

U+1D36x

𝍠

𝍡

𝍢

𝍣

𝍤

𝍥

𝍦

𝍧

𝍨

𝍩

𝍪

𝍫

𝍬

𝍭

𝍮

𝍯

U+1D37x

𝍰

𝍱

𝍲

𝍳

𝍴

𝍵

𝍶

𝍷

𝍸

Notes 1.^ As of Unicode version 16.0 2.^ Grey areas indicate non-assigned code points

History

The following Unicode-related documents record the purpose and process of defining specific characters in the Counting Rod Numerals block:

Version	Final code points[a]	Count	L2 ID	WG2 ID	Document
5.0	U+1D360..1D371	18	L2/04-227	N2816	Cullen, Christopher; Jenkins, John (2004-06-18), Proposal to add Chinese counting rod numerals to Unicode and ISO/IEC 10646
			L2/04-156R2		Moore, Lisa (2004-08-13), "Chinese counting rod numerals (C.17.7)", UTC #99 Minutes
11.0	U+1D372..1D376	5	L2/15-328		Lunde, Ken; Miura, Daisuke (2015-11-30), Proposal to encode tally marks
			L2/16-037		Anderson, Deborah; Whistler, Ken; McGowan, Rick; Pournader, Roozbeh; Glass, Andrew; Iancu, Laurențiu (2016-01-22), "17. Tally marks", Recommendations to UTC #146 January 2016 on Script Proposals
			L2/16-046		Lunde, Ken; Miura, Daisuke (2016-01-27), Proposal to encode five ideographic tally marks
			L2/16-004		Moore, Lisa (2016-02-01), "E.2", UTC #146 Minutes
	U+1D377..1D378	2	L2/15-328		Lunde, Ken; Miura, Daisuke (2015-11-30), Proposal to encode tally marks
			L2/16-037		Anderson, Deborah; Whistler, Ken; McGowan, Rick; Pournader, Roozbeh; Glass, Andrew; Iancu, Laurențiu (2016-01-22), "17. Tally marks", Recommendations to UTC #146 January 2016 on Script Proposals
			L2/16-065		Lunde, Ken; Miura, Daisuke (2016-03-14), Proposal to encode two Western-style tally marks
			L2/16-156		Anderson, Deborah; Whistler, Ken; Pournader, Roozbeh; Glass, Andrew; Iancu, Laurențiu (2016-05-06), "15. Tally Marks", Recommendations to UTC #147 May 2016 on Script Proposals
			L2/16-121		Moore, Lisa (2016-05-20), "E.7", UTC #147 Minutes
			L2/17-362		Moore, Lisa (2018-02-02), "C.2.1", UTC #153 Minutes
Proposed code points and characters names may differ from final code points and names

See also

• Numerals in Unicode

References

1. "Unicode character database". The Unicode Standard. Retrieved 2023-07-26.
2. "Enumerated Versions of The Unicode Standard". The Unicode Standard. Retrieved 2023-07-26.
3. The Unicode Standard, Version 15.0 – Electronic edition (PDF), Unicode, Inc., 2022, pp. 869–870