Andys Real Guide to Thailand

If you reached this page looking for a Thai numeral strip see the technical notes below .

Cultural and Glyph notes

Today Thai digits are only used within Thailand for government and Buddhist documentation. Very occasionally they can also be seen as house/property numbers. Most written material predating the 1929 coup uses them rather than the more familiar Arabic numerals.

Mouseover to see the number

The strip has been prepared in the hope that it may in some small way help to preserve the use of Thai numerals. Unfortunately Thai numerals are not easily recognised by many adult Thais, though they are still taught in schools.

You may note that the glyph for the digit '0' bears a strong resemblance to that of the Arabic. In common with many numeric systems used before the Arab based one became commonplace, Thai does not have it own representation for nought and 'borrows' this from Arabic.

The digit representing 9 in this strip is taken from the Angsana representation, which appears to be the most recognised form of the 3 representations that exist.

Technical Notes.

Above is a digit strip containing glyphs for the Thai digits 0-9, plus the Latin characters "A","P", & ":" (used when displaying the time). This gif was prepared for, and is ready to use with wwwcount v.2.5 - a Web CGI program frequently used to display visitor counters on web pages. You can see it in use at the bottom of this page and the Thai Guide Introduction.

The main strip file 'thai.gif' is a 2 colour gif of 234x20 pixels. Each glyph is represented by a block of 18x20 pixels offset exactly from 0x0. The glyphs were prepared using 'gimp', and the strip using the wwwcount 'mkstrip' program.

Download:
You can download a package containing the complete strip, individual digits and a plain text version of these notes.
Download the package in either .tar.gz or ZIP formats.

Also, there is a substantial collection of digit strips with both Arabic and non-Arabic numerals on Digit Mania

Andrew Gray
13 May 2003
http://andrew-gray/

Thai Digit Page visitor counter