Numerology letter chart and converter

The short answer

What number is each letter in numerology?

In numerology, each letter takes a number from a letter chart: the common Pythagorean chart counts A to I as 1 to 9 and starts again at J and S, and a word’s number is the sum of its letters reduced to a single digit or to 11, 22, or 33.

That is one of six letter ciphers on this page. The Chaldean chart gives letters values from 1 to 8 in a different grouping, and four English gematria ciphers count the alphabet from A = 1 to Z = 26, count it backward, or reduce each value to one digit. The converter above works in all six at once, and the tables below are the full charts.

Numerology letter charts

Pythagorean chart, 1 to 9

Read down a column to see every letter with that value. The alphabet fills the nine columns three times: A to I, J to R, then S to Z.

Chaldean chart, 1 to 8

The Chaldean chart does not follow alphabet order, and no letter is 9. Each column lists the letters that share a value.

Every cipher, A to Z

One row per letter, one column per cipher. The Pythagorean and Full Reduction columns match, because they are the same arithmetic under two names.

The method, step by step

How to convert letters to numbers

1. Choose a chart. Use the Pythagorean chart for most Western numerology, the Chaldean chart if you follow that tradition, or a gematria cipher for a plain total.
2. Write each letter’s value under it. Leave out spaces and punctuation. An accented letter counts as its plain letter, so é is E.
3. Add the values. In a gematria cipher, that total is the answer.
4. For numerology, reduce the total. Add its digits and repeat until one digit remains, but keep 11, 22, and 33 as they are. NUMBER gives 28 → 10 → 1.
5. For a full name, decide how to add it. The site’s Expression number reduces each part of the name before adding the parts. The name numerology calculator does that for you, and the complete numerology calculator adds your birth date.

Worked example

Six ciphers, two families

How the six ciphers differ

The first two are numerology charts: their totals are reduced and read as numbers with meanings. The other four are English gematria ciphers: their totals stand as they are.

Because the charts differ, one word has six totals. NUMBER is 28 in Pythagorean, 24 in Chaldean, 73 in English Ordinal, 28 in Full Reduction, 89 in Reverse Ordinal, and 35 in Reverse Reduction. None of them is the word’s single true number; each belongs to the cipher that produced it.

Where the charts come from

A short history of letter-number ciphers

Adding up the letters of a word began in alphabets whose letters were also numerals. Greek letters served as numbers, and adding a word’s letters is called isopsephy; one graffito at Pompeii names a loved one only by the number 545. Hebrew letters served as numerals too, and gematria, the reading of Hebrew words through their letter values in rabbinic and Kabbalistic literature, has its own standard method, mispar hechrachi, with values from 1 to 400. Those traditions belong to their own languages and texts, and the English ciphers here do not reproduce them.

The Latin alphabet never worked that way. Roman numerals use only seven letters, so any full A to Z cipher is a later invention. Renaissance writers such as Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa proposed schemes for Latin letters, and none became a standard.

The Pythagorean chart is modern. It carries the name of Pythagoras, whose school later writers linked with number philosophy, but the A to Z table comes from early twentieth-century American numerology, including L. Dow Balliett’s 1908 book The Philosophy of Numbers. The Chaldean chart takes its name from ancient Babylonia. In English it was popularized by Cheiro’s Book of Numbers in the 1920s, and its claimed ancient lineage was already disputed in print by 1938.

The four gematria ciphers are the newest. English Ordinal, Full Reduction, Reverse Ordinal, and Reverse Reduction are the names online gematria calculators use for them. This page keeps to those standard ciphers and leaves out invented variants.

Reading a total well

What a letter total can and cannot tell you

A total is arithmetic: anyone using the same chart gets the same number. What the number means comes from a tradition’s reading of it. The number library has this site’s readings for 1 to 9, 11, 22, and 33, including the number 1 that NUMBER reduces to. Treat those readings as prompts for reflection, not facts about a word or the person it names.

Two words with the same total share a sum and nothing more. English has hundreds of thousands of words, and most words total less than a few hundred in these ciphers, so matching totals are common and come from the arithmetic alone. That is why this page does not list words with the same value or decode names, dates, or headlines.