Bengali Numerals and the Digit System

Bengali has ten digits of its own: ০ ১ ২ ৩ ৪ ৫ ৬ ৭ ৮ ৯. They are an ordinary decimal, positional set - same values, same left-to-right reading order as 0-9, only the shapes differ. ৩৪৫ is three hundred and forty-five, and ০ in ১০৫ holds the empty tens place exactly as a Western zero does.

Three of them ambush every beginner. ৪ is four but reads as an 8 at a glance; ৬ is six but looks like a 9; ৯ is nine but looks like a lower-case b. Copy a Karwan Bazar price tag wrongly once and you will never forget them again.

You still meet these shapes constantly: on taka banknotes, on the number plate of a Dhaka taxi (ঢাকা মেট্রো-গ ১১-১১১১), on the calendar nailed above a grocer's counter, on exam papers, in the date line of Prothom Alo. Meanwhile phone screens, invoices and most shop tills have quietly gone over to 0-9. Unicode's locale data records that split precisely: Bangla's native digit set is Bengali, its default one is Latin. Learn both and you can read anything.

One to a hundred, the honest version

Here is the part textbooks skate over. Bengali does not assemble 11-19 from "ten" plus a unit the way English does with -teen, and it does not assemble 21-99 the way English does with a hyphen. Almost every number from ১ to ৯৯ is its own worn-down word, inherited from Sanskrit and eroded by centuries of use. There are about a hundred of them and they are learned, not derived.

Two patterns do rescue you. First, the twenties through nineties end in a family resemblance: একুশ (21), বাইশ (22), তেইশ (23), চব্বিশ (24), পঁচিশ (25) all carry the tail of বিশ. Second - and this one is a gift - the number just below each ten is built with ঊন-, "one less than": ঊনিশ 19, ঊনত্রিশ 29, ঊনচল্লিশ 39, ঊনপঞ্চাশ 49. Bengali children drill the rest as a sing-song chant called নামতা, the way you drilled your times tables.

A note on ২০: it has two names. বিশ is the standard one, but কুড়ি is what you will hear across the counter in West Bengal, and it is the only number in the language with a genuine everyday doublet.

হাজার, লাখ, কোটি - and where the commas fall

Above a thousand, South Asia stops counting in threes. There is no word for "million". Instead the ladder goes thousand, then lakh (a hundred thousand), then crore (ten million) - and the commas move with it.

The rule is three digits from the right, then twos forever: 12345678 is written ১,২৩,৪৫,৬৭৮ and read off as one crore, twenty-three lakh, forty-five thousand, six hundred and seventy-eight (এক কোটি তেইশ লাখ পঁয়তাল্লিশ হাজার ছয়শো আটাত্তর). This is not folklore - it is the machine-readable Bangla number format, #,##,##0.###, in Unicode's own locale database.

Get this wrong and the numbers that matter most stop making sense. Bangladesh's population is about ১৭ কোটি - seventeen crore, which is a hundred and seventy million, not seventeen million. A two-bedroom flat advertised in Mirpur at ৫০ লাখ টাকা costs five million taka, not five hundred thousand. And the taka sign itself has a Unicode slot of its own: ৳, so a bazaar chalkboard reads ৳ ১২০ per kilo.

The dates you will hear before you can count

Bengali dates take special endings, and the most famous ones are numbers first and holidays second. একুশে ফেব্রুয়ারি - the Twenty-First of February - is the day the language movement's martyrs were shot in 1952, and the Shaheed Minar fills with bare feet and flowers; the world knows it as International Mother Language Day. ২৬শে মার্চ is Independence Day, ১৬ই ডিসেম্বর Victory Day. And পয়লা বৈশাখ ১৪৩৩, the Bengali New Year that fell on 14 April 2026, is when traders shut the old ledger and open a fresh one - the ritual called হালখাতা, which is an accounting rite before it is a festival.

The endings follow a tidy rule: days 1-4 have their own forms (পয়লা, দোসরা, তেসরা, চৌঠা), days 5-18 take -ই (সাতই, ষোলোই), days 19-31 take -শে (ঊনিশে, একুশে, ছাব্বিশে).

A number cannot touch a noun bare

One last thing before you go shopping. In Bengali a numeral does not sit directly in front of a noun; it needs a classifier glued to it. -টা is the everyday one, -টি its softer, more courteous twin, and -জন is used for people. So it is দুটো টিকিট (two tickets), তিনটে আম (three mangoes), চারজন ছাত্র (four students) - never দুই টিকিট. The nouns themselves do not change shape: পাঁচটা বই and একটা বই use the identical word for book.