Numeral converter

Three notations, one operation

Each of these writes an ordinary integer in a system that is not positional decimal, which is why they share a page rather than three.

• Roman numerals — clock faces, book chapters, film credits, monarchs.
• Chinese capital numerals — 大寫, the anti-tampering forms used on cheques and contracts.
• Suzhou numerals — 蘇州碼子, still handwritten on price tags in Hong Kong markets.

They have almost nothing in common historically. What they share is that each one is a way of writing down a number that a computer will not do for you.

What they are actually for

Roman numerals are decorative in modern use, with one working exception: they distinguish front matter from body text in books, and they date films and monuments in a way that resists casual reading.

大寫 is not decorative at all. It exists because 一, 二 and 三 can be turned into each other with a single stroke of a pen, so any figure written that way on a cheque can be raised. The capital forms cannot be altered that way, and using them is a legal requirement on financial documents across the Chinese-speaking world.

蘇州碼子 comes from Song-dynasty commercial arithmetic and survived into the twentieth century as the shorthand of traders. Its glyphs are faster to write than 一二三 in a column, which is why it lasted where it did.

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