1 (number)

: This article discusses the number one. For the year AD 1, see 1. For other uses of 1, see 1 (disambiguation)

The Arabic glyph

The glyph used today in the Western world to represent the number 1, a vertical line, often with a little serif at the top and sometimes a short horizontal line at the bottom, traces its roots back to the Brahmin Indians, who wrote 1 as a horizontal line (in Chinese today this is the way it is written). The Gupta wrote it as a curved line, and the Nagari sometimes added a small circle on the left (rotated a quarter turn to the right, this 9-look-alike became the present day numeral 1 in the Gujarati and Punjabi scripts). The Nepali also rotated it to the right, but kept the circle small. This eventually became the top serif in the modern numeral, but the occasional short horizontal line at the bottom probably originates from similarity with the Roman numeral I.

Related Topics:
Chinese - Gupta - Nagari - Gujarati - Punjabi - Nepali

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In fonts with text figures, 1 is typically the same height as a lowercase X, for example, .

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