skaitmen

Skaitmen (digits) are the individual symbols used to represent numbers in a numeral system. In the most common system, decimal, the digit set consists of ten symbols: 0 through 9. A number is written as a sequence of digits, and the value of each digit is determined by its position in the sequence (the base-10 place values).

Different bases employ different sets of digits. For example, base-2 uses 0 and 1; base-16 uses 0–9 and A–F. Digits function both as symbols and as placeholders that convey magnitude through position. The concept distinguishes a digit from a numeral, since a number like 42 contains two digits but represents a single quantity.

Digits have a long history; the Hindu-Arabic numeral system, developed in India and transmitted to the Islamic world and Europe, established the use of ten decimal digits and the concept of zero as both a digit and a placeholder. This system replaced earlier writing schemes and enabled efficient arithmetic.

In modern computing and digital text, digits appear in many contexts. Decimals are used for human-facing numbers, while binary, octal, and hexadecimal digits are used for machine-oriented representations. Unicode and fonts provide digit characters across scripts, including Western 0–9 and digits from Arabic-Indic, extended Arabic digits, and other numeral sets. In data encoding and programming, careful handling of leading zeros, digit validation, and locale-specific digit shapes is important.