Counting Rod Numerals is a Unicode block containing traditional Chinese counting rod symbols, which mathematicians used for calculation in ancient China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. The orientation of the Unicode characters follows Song dynasty convention, with digits represented as horizontal lines, and tens represented as vertical lines, which differs from Han dynasty practice which represented digits as vertical lines, and tens as horizontal lines.

The block also contains five ideographic tally marks, based on the five strokes of the character 正, which are widely used in East Asia. There are also two characters for use in representing traditional European tally marks (only Tally Mark One and Tally Mark Five are encoded, with tally numbers two through four intended to be represented as a sequence of two through four Tally Mark One characters).

Block

Counting Rod Numerals[1][2] (PDF)
0123456789ABCDEF
U+1D36x𝍠𝍡𝍢𝍣𝍤𝍥𝍦𝍧𝍨𝍩𝍪𝍫𝍬𝍭𝍮𝍯
U+1D37x𝍰𝍱𝍲𝍳𝍴𝍵𝍶𝍷𝍸
Notes 1.^ As of Unicode version 17.0 2.^ Grey areas indicate non-assigned code points

History

The following Unicode-related documents record the purpose and process of defining specific characters in the Counting Rod Numerals block:

VersionFinal code pointsCountL2 IDWG2 IDDocument
5.0U+1D360..1D37118Cullen, Christopher; Jenkins, John (2004-06-18), Proposal to add Chinese counting rod numerals to Unicode and ISO/IEC 10646
Moore, Lisa (2004-08-13), "Chinese counting rod numerals (C.17.7)", UTC #99 Minutes
11.0U+1D372..1D3765Lunde, Ken; Miura, Daisuke (2015-11-30), Proposal to encode tally marks
Anderson, Deborah; Whistler, Ken; McGowan, Rick; Pournader, Roozbeh; Glass, Andrew; Iancu, Laurențiu (2016-01-22), "17. Tally marks", Recommendations to UTC #146 January 2016 on Script Proposals
Lunde, Ken; Miura, Daisuke (2016-01-27), Proposal to encode five ideographic tally marks
Moore, Lisa (2016-02-01), "E.2", UTC #146 Minutes
U+1D377..1D3782Lunde, Ken; Miura, Daisuke (2015-11-30), Proposal to encode tally marks
Anderson, Deborah; Whistler, Ken; McGowan, Rick; Pournader, Roozbeh; Glass, Andrew; Iancu, Laurențiu (2016-01-22), "17. Tally marks", Recommendations to UTC #146 January 2016 on Script Proposals
Lunde, Ken; Miura, Daisuke (2016-03-14), Proposal to encode two Western-style tally marks
Anderson, Deborah; Whistler, Ken; Pournader, Roozbeh; Glass, Andrew; Iancu, Laurențiu (2016-05-06), "15. Tally Marks", Recommendations to UTC #147 May 2016 on Script Proposals
Moore, Lisa (2016-05-20), "E.7", UTC #147 Minutes
Moore, Lisa (2018-02-02), "C.2.1", UTC #153 Minutes

See also