Dozenal Character Sets: New numbers for a duodecimal counting system                                   08 February 2005

Rough Draft

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Any time we start talking about adopting a new number base for our counting, we have to come to terms with the fact that, if that base is greater than ten, we are going to need new characters to represent the single digit numbers between nine and whatever the base is.  The hexadecimalists have been very unimaginative, preferring to assign the letters A-F to the numbers ten through fifteen.  Not only does this show a lack of imagination, it is extremely inefficient as you suddenly have numbers that might be mistaken for words.  Proponents of duodecimal counting have been a lot more creative in this regard over the years.  The best characters can be made with no more than two pen strokes, but one is preferred (just like one syllable is preferred for number names). 

Isaac Pitman proposed the first well-known dozenal characters in the nineteenth century.  Pitman had the idea that if nine is just a six turned upside down, why can't we do that with other numbers?  And thus, he rotated the two and the three 180 degrees and used these new characters to represent ten and eleven respectively.  The trouble is (though not for Pitman) that in digital format, these characters look like '5' and 'E' respectively. 

The second major proposal came from F. Emerson Andrews of the Dozenal Society of America.  He suggested using a stylized 'X' and 'E' for ten and eleven respectively.  While this one still doesn't work efficiently with a digital display, I find it useful for typing since my keyboard won't do other proposed characters. 

The third major proposal comes from Don Hammond of the Dozenal Society of Great Britain.  Hammond was very innovative in tweaking the Pitman characters to make them different enough to work in a digital format.  With the Hammond characters, it is possible to easily make a dozenal calculator with a digital display.

I decided to further tweak Hammond's characters to make them even more like their digital counterparts.  My variant is my own preferred set.