Riding in the taxi on the way to the office. Thousands of us creeping along, needing three or four cycles of green/yellow/red lights to get through one intersection.

It gives me plenty of time to gaze out the window of my hermetically sealed (and delightfully air-conditioned) cab … and look at license plates that have the Arabic numerals we know and talk about … just below numbers used by real Arabs … that are anything but “Arabic” in the Western sense.

What is up with that?

Turns out, Arabs mostly don’t use what we call Arabic numerals. It’s a misnomer along the lines of calling Native Americans “Indians” because Columbus thought he had reached India when he was, in fact, in the Bahamas.

Follow this link, and scroll about half way down the first screen, and you can see what the numbers the Arabs in the United Arab Emirates actually use.

Zero is a dot. One looks like one. There’s that. Two looks like a backward 7. Three looks like a backward 7 with a wrinkle in the cap. Four is is backward 3. Five is a zero. Six is a 7. Seven is a vee, eight is an unside down vee, and nine … actually looks like a 9!

What’s the deal? According to another account I found, the numbers we call “Arabic” did in fact originate in Arabia … migrated across the coast of North Africa and entered Europe through Spain, where they eventually were adopted by the Western world as a vast improvement on the Roman system of letters, a system that lacked a fairly key compnent … the symbol for (and idea of) zero. 

Meanwhile, the actual Arabs apparently came under the sway of Persian/Hindi numbers, and they use them to this day.  That same account suggested that some Arab countries had considered shifting back to “Arabic” numbers … but hadn’t, so far.

So, anyway … “Arabic numerals” as we know them … none of the living Arabs use them.