Cistercian Numerals

Published on Tuesday 10 February 2026

As you know I have a fascination with numbers and a few years ago (Jul 25, 2023 / Jul 1, 2024) I found Cistercian Numerals so I built a site to document them. Luckily there were some CodePens with interactive tools to work with.

The medieval Cistercian numerals, or "ciphers" in nineteenth-century parlance, were developed by the Cistercian monastic order in the early thirteenth century at about the time that Arabic numerals were introduced to northwestern Europe. They are more compact than Arabic or Roman numerals, with a single glyph able to indicate any integer from 1 to 9,999.

There isn't much I can add to them but I've kept a copy for myself.

But this could work well to help with additions/updates to Kaktovik Numerals.

Site

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