Reading Persian numerals on a date: ۱۴۰۵ and the other nine digits

You can see the date on the certificate, the coin or the banknote. You just cannot type it, because the digits are not the ones on your keyboard.

The ten digits

Two worth memorising because they trip people up most: ۵ is five, not zero, and ۰ is zero — a small dot or short stroke rather than an oval.

These are not the same as the Arabic digits

There are two related digit sets in Unicode, and sources routinely conflate them.

Unicode calls the Persian range Extended Arabic-Indic (U+06F0–06F9) and annotates the Arabic-Indic block with a pointer to it: those digits are “used with Arabic proper; for languages of Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India, see the Eastern Arabic-Indic digits at 06F0-06F9.”

One disagreement worth flagging rather than smoothing over. The Unicode core specification says there are distinct forms “for the digits four, five, six and seven” — four digits. Wikipedia’s comparison lists only three, omitting seven. I have gone with the standard.

There is a second, subtler difference that matters if you are handling these in software: the two ranges have different Unicode bidi classes. U+0660–0669 are AN (Arabic Number), U+06F0–06F9 are EN (European Number). That affects how a rendering engine lays them out next to other text.

Digits run left to right inside right-to-left text

This is the part that feels wrong the first time. Persian script reads right to left. The numbers inside it do not.

So a year printed as ۱۴۰۵ is one, four, zero, five reading left to right: 1405. You do not reverse it. If reversing seems to give a more plausible year, that is coincidence, not a rule.

The century check, and why it is weaker than it used to be

A common shortcut: a modern Shamsi year starts ۱۳ or ۱۴, so if your transcription gives something else, you have probably misread a glyph. As of 2026 the Shamsi year is ۱۴۰۵.

Useful, but be careful, because it no longer distinguishes the two calendars. Iranian and Afghan documents also carry lunar Hijri dates, and the lunar year number has now caught up into the 1400s as well:

So today a bare “۱۴۴۷” could be either a future Shamsi year or the current lunar one, and the leading digits do not settle it. The month name does: solar months are Farvardin, Ordibehesht, Esfand; lunar months are Muharram, Safar, Ramadan. Telling solar from lunar goes into this properly.

That gap between the two year numbers is also growing, not shrinking — a lunar year is about eleven days shorter than a solar one, so the lunar count gains roughly a year every 33.

Paste them straight in

Once you have read the digits, you do not need to convert them to Latin ones by hand. The converter accepts Persian digits directly — and Arabic-Indic ones too — so you can type or paste ۱۴۰۵/۰۶/۲۴ as it appears:

Two honest limits

Old coins are often lunar, not solar. Iranian coinage predating the solar calendar’s adoption is dated in the lunar AH calendar. Reading the digits correctly still leaves you with a date this converter will not handle.

You may not be looking at a Shamsi date at all. Some Iranian documents from the late 1970s carry Imperial years in the 25xx range — ۲۵۳۵ is a real year label. That is covered in why a document says 2535.

And a caution about other guides: at least one numismatic reference converts Persian dates by adding a flat 621 to the year. That is the fixed-offset mistake — every Shamsi year straddles two Gregorian years, so a single offset is wrong for part of every year. Common conversion mistakes has the detail.