A Brief Introduction to Dozenal Counting

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This site and the documents on it are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

This site expresses numbers in alternative bases, particularly dozenal (also called duodecimal, or base twelve).
The DSA does not endorse any particular notation or pronunciation scheme for alternative bases.
However this site defaults to the following to ensure online readability across all platforms:
“Computerese” uppercase letters represent transdecimal digits: A = ten, B = eleven, C = twelve, etc.
Single-character subscripts annotate bases: d = decimal, z = dozenal, x = hexadecimal, etc., e.g., 2014_d = 11BA_z = 7DE_x.


PDF documents on this site reflect changing practices among dozenalists over the years:
Various symbols have been used to represent digits ten and eleven:
Dwiggins 𝒳 and Ɛ (often rendered X and E); Bell Telephone * and #; Pitman turned 2 and 3 (↊ and ↋); etc.
Italics were once used to distinguish dozenal numbers from decimal: e.g. 0.5 = 0.6.
Later, semicolon became a separate‑identity “dozenal point”, versus period as “decimal point”: e.g., 0.5 = 0;6.
However, subscript base annotations provide a more versatile solution that is least‑change: e.g., 0.5_d = 0.6_z = 0.8_x

Dozenal offers superior divisibility over decimal, which can make everyday arithmetic easier to learn:
⅙ = 0.2_z | ¼ = 0.3_z | ⅓ = 0.4_z | ½ = 0.6_z | ⅔ = 0.8_z | ¾ = 0.9_z | ⅚ = 0.A_z
⅙ = 0.1666…_d | ¼ = 0.25_d | ⅓ = 0.333…_d | ½ = 0.5_d | ⅔ = 0.666…_d | ¾ = 0.75_d | ⅚ = 0.8333…_d

EACH ONE, TEACH ONE.