Arabic Numbers

The table below shows examples of Arabic numbers. The first and the fifth columns have numbers used in some Arab countries; they’re not of Arabic origins but still used in many places especially copies of the Holy Qur’an... Nowadays what we call the Arabic numbers are the numbers shown on the columns 2 and 6. This numbering system is used by the Arab world as well as the rest of the world, and gradually replaced Roman numerals as the predominant method of counting as it is much simpler for writing and calculating totals.

Forming numbers in Arabic is quite easy, from 13 to 19 you just place a number before ten for example 13 = three ten, instead of thirteen in English, 17 is seven ten in Arabic. From 21 to 99 you just need to reverse the numbers and add (wa- between the two numbers) 36 would be six wa- thirty instead of thirty six (sitta wa-thalathun), (wa means and).

0 is sifr in Arabic, from which the word cipher came. For 11 and 12 they’re irregular, so just remember how to write them by now (11 = ehda ‘ashar, 12 = ithna ‘ashar).

So in general, numbers standing alone are easy to use, or say. The hard part is that numbers 3 to 10 have a unique rule of agreement with nouns known as polarity: A numeral in masculine gender should agree with a feminine referrer and vice versa (thalathatu awlaad = three boys), boys are masculine plural, so the feminine form of number 3 should be used (which is thalathatu, and not thalathu which is the masculine form, the u at the end of numbers is used when a number is followed by another word to make an easy jump to the next word) (thalathu banaat = three girls) banaat = girls, which is feminine plural, therefore a masculine form of number 3 should be used (thalathu). That may sound complicated but once you get used to it, it will not be as hard as it seems now, besides most Arab natives make mistakes or simply don’t care about  matching the gender and the number.

Arabic Ordinal Numbers:

Ordinal numbers in Arabic are almost like the cardinal numbers, with some exceptions in the numbers from 1 to 10, and a slight difference in numbers from 11 and up.

Note that ordinal numbers in Arabic are somehow like adjectives, so they have to take the masculine, or feminine form. Please check the adjectives page for more information.

After 10 only the first number takes the feminine, for example 13^th is thaleth achar for masculine, and thalethata achar for feminine, achar stays the same, the first half “thaleth” which means 3^rd takes “a” in the feminine, and so does the rest of the ordinal number, except ten numbers like 20, 30, 40, 50, they look like cardinal numbers but they add “a” as a prefix for numbers starting with a consonant, for example: 70 = sab’un, 70^th = asab’un (for both masculine and feminine), and they add “al” for ten numbers starting with a vowel, like: 40= arba’un, 40^th = alarba’un.