1094: Isopsephy Dec 7, 2017

Several cultures have used letters to represent numerals. Famously, the Romans and other Europeans used Romans numerals, which assigns numbers to letters, but quite often, people would do it the other way around. Isopsephy is a Greek word denoting the practice of taking the sum of the numbers assigned to a word, but this requires that every letter in a given writing-system has a numeric value. This practice was Greek, but other cultures with other writing systems did this as well, including with the Roman alphabet, the Hebrew alephbet, and the Arabic abjad. Some people used this for prophesies, while other people would use this alphanumeric system as a code of sorts. While certainly less popular today, the notion that the number of the beast is 666 or, historically, 616 comes from this practice, but given that different people assigned different numbers to letters in both the same and different writing-systems, the same word will often yield varying results.