قواعدِ حساب

The twenty-eight letters

Mashriqi is the default. The six letters where Maghribi differs are marked; every other letter carries the same value in both.

The sequence, as it is recited

ابجد هوز حطي كلمن سعفص قرشت ثخذ ضظغ

ابجد هوز حطي كلمن صعفض قرست ثخذ ظغش

What counts, and what does not

The 28 letters

ء and ے are not members. They fold onto the letter they are written over — ء onto its carrier, ے onto ی.

Urdu letters

Fold to the Arabic base by written skeleton: پ→ب 2, چ→ج 3, گ→ک 20, ژ→ز 7, ٹ→ت 400, ڈ→د 4, ڑ→ر 200, ں→ن 50, ھ→ہ 5, ے→ی 10.

خ

Six hundred, always. It never folds onto ج, though the shapes are close.

Hamza carriers

آ أ إ ؤ ئ count as the base letter alone — never the base plus a hamza. The hamza is a mark on the letter, not a letter beside it.

لا

ل + ا = 31. A ligature of two letters, not a twenty-ninth letter.

ة

Word-scoped: silent at a word end and counted as ہ 5, pronounced inside a word and counted as ت 400. A word’s value never depends on what is typed beside it.

Shadda

Does not double the letter. Arabic writes the letter once and the shadda marks the gemination; the count follows the writing.

Dagger alif

Not counted. It stands for an alif the orthography omits, and adding it would count a letter that is not written.

Diacritics

Not counted. Short vowels, sukun and tanwin are marks on letters rather than letters.

The elements, and the two orderings

The 28 letters divide into four sevens, one seven per element. But two orderings of the elements circulate, and they are different principles rather than a right and a wrong. This site follows the zodiacal order; some kitabs — including one this site draws on — follow the descent order, and under that ordering 21 of the 28 letters carry a different element. If your book disagrees with this page about a letter’s element, this is almost certainly why.

Zodiacal — fire, earth, air, water

The order of the signs: Aries fire, Taurus earth, Gemini air, Cancer water. Used by the Arabic compilations that describe the four-sevens partition, and by this engine.

Descent — fire, air, water, earth

The cosmological order of the spheres, fire outermost to earth at the centre. Used by Ibn Arabi’s sequence and by kitabs that follow it.

The engine’s reason is arithmetical, not preference: under the zodiacal ordering, a total taken mod 12 to a burj and then to its element agrees with the same total taken mod 4 straight to an element. A site that also computes the burj must use the burj’s order or contradict itself two routes down. The ordering is stated here so it can be checked, not asserted.

Check us against yourself

Computed live, by the same engine every other page uses. If a figure here is wrong, every figure on the site is wrong.