Why the Name number comes out different on different sites
In name numerology, calculating the Name number takes three actions: each letter is given a digit from 1 to 9, the digits are added, and the sum is reduced to a single digit. It's hard for a calculator to go wrong in the addition. Sites diverge earlier — at the first step, in the letter table.
There are at least two tables in use. In the first, the Russian alphabet is taken whole: 33 letters, with Yo in its own seventh place. In the second, Yo has no separate place — it is counted as E, and 32 positions remain. It looks like an argument over one rare letter. In fact the digits change for every letter from Zh to Ya — twenty-six of them — and for Yo itself.
We calculate by the first table. That doesn't mean it is “right”: neither has an evidence base, just as numerology as a whole doesn't. The choice of table is a convention of a school, not a discovery. Only the arithmetic can be asserted firmly: which table gives which number.
The letter table and the formula our page uses
The rule of our table: the letter's number in the alphabet minus one, the remainder of division by nine, plus one. Simpler — the digits go in a circle: A = 1, B = 2 and so on to Z = 9, and I is 1 again. By rows: 1 — A, I, S, hard sign; 2 — B, Y (short i), T, Yy; 3 — V, K, U, soft sign; 4 — G, L, F, Eh; 5 — D, M, Kh, Yu; 6 — E, N, Ts, Ya; 7 — Yo, O, Ch; 8 — Zh, P, Sh; 9 — Z, R, Shch.
An example — Roman. R = 9, O = 7, M = 5, A = 1, N = 6. The sum is 28. Reducing: 2 + 8 = 10, once more: 1 + 0 = 1. The Name number is 1.
Three details where it's easy to lose a digit. Y (short i) is a separate letter, eleventh in order, and equals 2, not 1 like I. The soft sign is counted: it is thirtieth in the alphabet and equals 3. The hard sign is counted too and equals 1. Case, spaces and hyphens don't affect the result.
The letter Yo in name numerology: what changes if it is counted as E
Let's remove Yo from the alphabet and number the letters again. A, B, V, G, D, E keep their digits. Zh moves from the eighth place to the seventh, Z from the ninth to the eighth, and so on to the end. Every letter from Zh to Ya loses one, and those that were a one — I, S, hard sign — become a nine. Yo itself gets 6 instead of 7, like E.
The same Roman by this table: R = 8, O = 6, M = 4, A = 1, N = 5. The sum is 24, the number 6. There is no letter Yo in the name, yet the number is different: four letters out of five have shifted.
Hence the conversion rule. Count how many letters in the name are other than A, B, V, G, D, E. Step back from our final digit by that many steps around the circle 9, 8, 7 … 1 and 9 again — you get the number by the table without Yo. Roman has four such letters: from one backward — 9, 8, 7, 6. It matches. Each shifted letter changes the sum by minus one up to a multiple of nine, and nines vanish in reduction. So numbers reduced to a single digit coincide only when there are no shifted letters at all or their count is divisible by nine.
We ran forty names through both tables. The list is ours, put together by eye from names that are well known, it is not registry-office statistics: Aleksandr, Sergey, Dmitriy, Andrey, Aleksey, Maksim, Ivan, Mikhail, Artyom, Nikita, Vladimir, Nikolay, Evgeniy, Roman, Igor, Pavel, Denis, Ilya, Kirill, Oleg, Anna, Mariya, Elena, Olga, Natalya, Tatyana, Irina, Ekaterina, Svetlana, Yuliya, Anastasiya, Darya, Viktoriya, Ksenia, Polina, Alyona, Sofiya, Marina, Lyudmila, Nadezhda. The Name number diverged for forty out of forty: the shifted letters in these names number from two to seven. Matches had to be hunted for separately. Konstantin — nine shifted letters, 8 by both tables. Eva and Ada — none, 1 and 7 by both tables.
Soul number and Personality number: how to count by vowels and consonants
Two more numbers are calculated from the same name. The Soul number is the sum of the vowels alone: A, E, Yo, I, O, U, Yy, Eh, Yu, Ya. The Personality number is the sum of everything else: consonants, including Y (short i), and both signs, soft and hard. For Roman the vowels O and A give 7 + 1 = 8, the consonants R, M, N — 9 + 5 + 6 = 20, that is 2.
Next comes interpretation — this is how the system describes the numbers, not a measured fact. In the full reading, the number from all letters is read as what a person carries outward, the Soul number as the inner motive, the Personality number as the first impression. Both the names and the readings wander even on our own site: on the Name number page the sum of all letters is called the Name number and is read as “how you're seen,” by the full name the same sum is the Expression number; in the full reading the same sum is labeled the “Destiny number.” When comparing two sites, check which letters are added, not what the result is called.
The table affects these two numbers too. On the same forty names the Personality number diverged for all forty. The Soul number — for thirty-one. For nine it matched, because all their vowels are A and E, and these letters come before Yo and don't shift: Aleksandr, Sergey, Andrey, Aleksey, Pavel, Anna, Elena, Svetlana, Nadezhda.
The soft sign, Y and master numbers 11 and 22: where else calculators diverge
The soft sign. If a calculator skips it, Igor gets 3 instead of 6: with the soft sign the sum is 24, without it 21. In our list the soft sign is in six names out of forty — Igor, Ilya, Olga, Natalya, Tatyana, Darya. In the engine of our reading the soft sign used to drop out of the table. Now there is a test for its completeness — all 33 letters, each in its own place.
Yo instead of E. By our table these are different letters, so Artyom (with Yo) is 6 and Artem (with E) is 5; Alyona (with Yo) is 1 and Alena (with E) is 9. Enter the name with the e with two dots if it has one. In the table without Yo both spellings give the same number: there it is one letter.
Master numbers. Some schools don't reduce 11, 22 and 33 to a single digit, some do — where that came from is covered in a separate article, linked at the bottom. With us the divergence is visible right on the site: the Name number page reduces to the end, and for 11 or 22 adds a line about the master number; the full reading leaves 11, 22 and 33 as they are. So Ivan on the first page is 2 with a line about master number 11, and in the full reading it is 11. The sum is the same, only the notation differs. In our list six names come out as a master number by all letters: Andrey, Ivan and Vladimir — 11, Pavel, Kirill and Mariya — 22.
How to check a Name number calculator — and the number itself
Checking the arithmetic. First calculate the name on paper by the table from this article and write down the sum and the result. Then enter it on the Name number page: it prints every letter with its digit, the sum and the result. If the addition on paper is right and the result on the page is different, the error is ours. In the PDF reading the breakdown is more detailed: three chains — all letters, vowels, consonants with signs. Letters outside the table, for example the Ukrainian dotted І, are named in a separate line there, not silently skipped.
Checking another site. Take its number and ours. They match — most likely the table is the same. The other number equals ours minus the number of shifted letters around the circle — that table is without Yo. Neither fits — the cause is a third one: the soft sign skipped, Y (short i) equated to I, the master number handled differently. We haven't worked through those variants. A letter-by-letter breakdown will help find the divergence — if the second site prints one.
Checking the interpretation itself — one that can be failed. Deadline — a week. Choose five well-known people and give a helper their names — the ones they are actually called by. The helper calculates each person's Name number by our table and by the table without Yo, reduces both to a single digit from 1 to 9 and copies out from the number guide three descriptions: ours, the other, and any third that doesn't match the first two. He removes digits and headings from the texts and shuffles the order. If for someone the numbers by the two tables matched, it's better to replace that person. Your part is to mark which of the three descriptions is about that person, and to write down the choice before the helper shows the key.
At random you get one hit in three, on five people — on average fewer than two. The threshold — four hits out of five on “our” description: by chance four or five come up in 11 cases out of 243, less than one in twenty. That is not yet proof, but a reason to repeat the experiment on another five people. Three is a gray zone: that many or more comes up at random in about every fifth attempt. Two or fewer — our table is indistinguishable from a coin toss. The other table is measured by the same threshold: four choices out of five in its favor is an argument for it, and a difference of one hit on five people means nothing. A correction for two attempts: the chance that at least one of the two tables gets four by accident is 22 out of 243, about one in eleven. And if both are at the level of a coin toss, that is an argument not against a table but against the method, and we won't look for a softer wording.