Slavic Cyrillic Numerals
Slavic Cyrillic numerals are a way of counting with Cyrillic letters that was used in Rus' before the reforms of Peter the Great. A letter marked with a titlo (a small stroke above it) stood for a number: аз (az) — 1, веди (vedi) — 2, глаголь (glagol) — 3. This is the basis of the Russian-language version of name numerology.
How the Count Works
The values did not follow the alphabet in sequence but were modeled on the Greek system: units, tens, hundreds.
| Letter | Number | Letter | Number | Letter | Number |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| А | 1 | І | 10 | Р | 100 |
| E | 2 | К | 20 | N | 200 |
| Г | 3 | Л | 30 | Т | 300 |
| Д | 4 | М | 40 | У | 400 |
| Е | 5 | Н | 50 | Ф | 500 |
| Ѕ | 6 | Ѯ | 60 | Х | 600 |
| W | 7 | О | 70 | Ѱ | 700 |
| И | 8 | П | 80 | Ѡ | 800 |
| Ѳ | 9 | Ч | 90 | Ц | 900 |
The letters Б, Ж, Ш, Щ, Ъ, Ы, Ь, Э, Ю and Я had no numerical values: they were absent from the Greek model. A caveat about Я: in old manuscripts, nine hundred was written not only with the letter Ц but also with the little yus (Ѧ), from which the letter Я descends. The calculator, like most modern schools, does not count Я.
The letters Й and Ё did not exist in the old alphabet: Й is И with a breve (the “short I”), and Ё appeared only in the 18th century. So the calculator counts Й as И (8) and Ё as Е (5).
How a name is calculated
The values of the letters in the name are added up and the sum is reduced to a single digit, with no master numbers. Letters with no numerical value are either skipped or replaced with similar-sounding ones — there is no single rule, and this is the method's main weakness.
Our calculator skips letters without a numerical value and shows exactly which ones were skipped, so you can check the result by hand. The resulting digit is the name number; its meaning is covered on the number meanings pages.
What is historical here and what isn't
The historical part is the numeral system itself: it is authentic, used to write dates in chronicles and to number pages in books until the 1700s.
The non-historical part is the numerological interpretation. Adding up the letters of a name and drawing conclusions about character was not a practice in old Rus': the Cyrillic numerals were a system for writing numbers, not a form of divination. The interpretations were added in the 20th century, modeled on Western numerology.
So the method is best seen as a modern calculation on a historical foundation.