Where our numbers come from
Two numerologists can give the same person different numbers in complete good faith, because the letter tables genuinely differ. Most sites pick one and sound certain. This page names the table behind every result, and says plainly which ones are disputed.
Pythagorean
CanonicalSource: Juno Jordan / Hans Decoz — standard Western table
Values used: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9.
Y is treated as: a vowel only when it carries the syllable — decided per occurrence.
Chaldean
CanonicalSource: Cheiro (Louis Hamon) / Sepharial
Values used: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 — no letter is assigned 9.
Y is treated as: always a consonant.
Kabbalah
ContestedSource: Modern Latin-alphabet adaptation — no single canonical source
Values used: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 — no letter is assigned 9.
Y is treated as: always a consonant.
Tamil
ContestedSource: Chaldean values as used in South Indian practice — awaiting a cited source
Values used: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 — no letter is assigned 9.
Y is treated as: always a consonant.
Hebrew (gematria)
ContestedSource: Standard gematria values via Latin transliteration — no agreed standard
Values used: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 … up to 400.
Y is treated as: always a consonant.
Why three are marked contested
Not a hedge. A gate: contested systems are excluded from our canonical set and every result derived from one carries a warning.
Kabbalah
Classical Kabbalah works with the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet and the paths of the Tree of Life. It has no canonical mapping onto the twenty-six letters of the Latin alphabet at all. The table most numerology software publishes is a modern adaptation, not a tradition with an agreed source.
Tamil
What is sold as Tamil numerology is, in practice, the Chaldean table applied to a Tamil-transliterated name. The meaningful variation lives in the transliteration step rather than in the values, and no single Latin-alphabet table is agreed.
Hebrew (gematria)
Real gematria assigns aleph 1 through tav 400. Mapping that onto Latin letters needs a transliteration choice no two sources make identically, and several Latin letters have no clean Hebrew equivalent — C, Q, W and X among them. Note also that gematria totals are much larger than in the other systems, which is correct rather than a bug.
If you have a printed source we should be using, tell us. We would rather cite a specific book than publish a table we cannot attribute. Get in touch.