The Eastern Arabic numerals, also called Indo-Arabic numerals, or Arabic-Indic numerals, as known by Unicode, are the symbols used to represent numerical digits in conjunction with the Arabic alphabet in the countries of the Mashriq (the east of the Arab world) and the Arabian Peninsula, and the variants in other countries that use the Persian numerals on the Iranian plateau and in Asia.
The early HinduâÂÂArabic numeral system used a variety of shapes. It is unknown when the Western Arabic numeral shapes diverged from those of Eastern Arabic numerals; it is considered that 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 9 are related in both versions, but 6, 7 and 8 are from different sources.
The numeral system originates from an ancient Indian numeral system, which was reintroduced during the Islamic Golden Age in the book On the Calculation with Hindic Numerals written by the Persian mathematician and engineer al-Khwarizmi, whose name was Latinized as Algoritmi.
These numbers are known as () in Arabic. They are sometimes also called Indic numerals or ArabicâÂÂIndic numerals in English. However, that is sometimes discouraged as it can lead to confusion with Indian numerals, used in Brahmic scripts of the Indian subcontinent.
Each numeral in the Persian variant has a different Unicode point even if it looks identical to the Eastern Arabic numeral counterpart. However, the variants used with Urdu, Sindhi, and other Languages of South Asia are not encoded separately from the Persian variants.