I would strongly encourage anyone who knows an Arabic-script language to learn how to type in it. This isn’t as difficult as one might imagine — especially on mobile devices, whose support for various languages is now often more seamless than that of desktop operating systems — and it opens up a whole new world of resources online. However, if you would like to use thisabjad calculator but cannot type your input directly, there are a couple of alternatives. First, Google has developed clever tools for bothArabic andPersian that allow you to enter a phonetic approximation of your intended words in Latin script, and then transliterate them with little fuss. You could use one of these tools and copy-paste the result into the box above. The second fallback option is actually aseparate version of this page, in which buttons may be used to enter Arabic or Persian words one letter at a time.
By default, this program will assign anabjad value of 1 to the isolated form ofhamzah (ء), treating it the same as if it were placed on analif. Since this is not a universally agreed-upon practice, there is a checkbox to allow for the isolatedhamzah to be ignored in calculation. (Please refer to the following section for more information on this dilemma and others like it.)
I’ve set the default letter values according to the more common “Eastern” convention. There is now an option to switch to the Maghribi order using a checkbox, for those who need it. Please refer tothis table for a reminder of the differences between the two systems. (Only you can determine which of them is applicable to your sources.)
Feel free to include spaces between words, or evenzero-width non-joiners; they won’t affect the calculation.
More broadly, the program is designed to ignore any character that it doesn’t recognize. If you enter a string of text containing one or more extraneous characters, you’ll see a brief error message, followed by the totalabjad value of the parts thatwere counted — i.e., our best guess. It may still be correct…
I recommend that you not include punctuation, or diacritical marks, ordaggeralifs, or anything else outside of the “base letters.” Only the last category is counted in theabjad system, anyway, so why add complication?
If you’re confident that you entered valid text in Arabic or Persian script, but you received an error message, please let me knowby email. It might be a bug!
The fundamentals ofabjad numerals are covered in the relevantWikipedia entry, and they are observed here faithfully. (I’ve also posted atable of letter values for good measure.) If one digs a bit deeper, however, questions and ambiguities begin to arise…
The treatment of the four “Persian letters” — pe,che,zhe, andgāf — is in fact relatively straightforward. Please refer to the same Wikipedia entry. In general, there should be no problem using Persian text. (Urdu? Pashto? I’m afraid those alphabets are not yet fully integrated.)
There is, however, one potentially confusing point in Persian: thesilenthā’. The answer is to treat this letter as we would any otherhā’. (See the following note for the reasoning here.) Also, if you are among the stubborn few who use the Unicode character06C0 (ۀ) to representiżāfah on a silenthā’, that will be recognized just the same.
This program treats the Arabic lettertā’ marbūṭah as if it werehā’ and assigns it a value of 5. This is due to a general principle inabjad calculation, that we judge letters by theirform (rasm), rather than by their pronunciation or other factors.
Similarly,alif maqṣūrah is considered equivalent toyā’ and assigned a value of 10.
The treatment ofhamzah is most troublesome of all, since it appears in conjunction with several different letters. But we need only continue to prioritize form.Hamzah onwāw (ؤ) is given the value ofwāw (6).Hamzah onyā’ (ئ) is given the value ofyā’ (10). Any variant ofhamzah onalif, unsurprisingly, receives a value of 1. Finally, as has been explained above, this programdoes assign a value of 1 to the isolated form ofhamzah (ء), which is most often found at the end of certain Arabic words. This is a contested point; a few of the guides that I consulted state explicitly thathamzah by itself should not be counted, since the appropriate value would come from the letter on which it is seated. In the end, I followed position of the Baha’i community. It has long been symbolically important in their faith that the name Bahā’ (بهاء) has anabjad value of 9, which requires that the finalhamzah be counted. Users who don’t want this feature can disable it.
It bears emphasis that any form ofalif will be given a value of 1. This includesalif maddah, which some have treated as a “doublehamzah alif ” with a value of 2. Here we may invoke another general principle ofabjad numerals: each letter is counted once. Just asshaddah is (typically) not taken into consideration, nor shouldalif maddah receive double value.