Numbers & science
Cistercian Numerals
Interactive medieval Cistercian numeral chart and converter for numbers 1–9,999, with downloadable SVG glyphs.
How it works: One stave can encode 1–9,999. The upper right is ones; upper left tens; lower right hundreds; lower left thousands. This uses the familiar modern vertical-stave presentation; medieval manuscripts sometimes used horizontal staves or variant digit shapes.
1984
Four place values
10s upper left
1s upper right
1000s lower left
100s lower right
Digits 1–9 in the upper-right quadrant
The same forms are mirrored across the middle stave to build the tens, hundreds and thousands.
Zero: A place value of 0 simply has no extra stroke. A completely blank stave is not a historical symbol for the number zero, so this converter starts at 1.