Names With Accents, Hyphens and Multiple Surnames

The Pythagorean letter table maps A through Z to the numbers 1 through 9. It says nothing about e with an acute accent, n with a tilde, or a hyphen joining two surnames, because the modern chart was built around the plain English alphabet. Any name that steps outside those 26 letters forces a decision, and different calculators quietly decide differently. That is why the same name can return different numbers on different sites: not because one site's arithmetic is wrong, but because each made different choices about what to count before the arithmetic began.

We think those choices should be visible rather than buried in code. Everything below describes exactly what this site does, presented honestly as one convention among several. If you know the rules, you can reproduce every result by hand, and you can compare our convention with others on equal footing.

This site folds every accented letter to its base Latin letter before counting. An e with an acute accent becomes e and counts as 5, n with a tilde becomes n and counts as 5, u with an umlaut becomes u and counts as 3, and c with a cedilla becomes c and counts as 3. The German sharp s is expanded to ss. This is the most common convention in modern Latin-alphabet numerology, and it matches how most people would spell their own name when typing without an accented keyboard.

It is not the only defensible choice. Some practitioners argue that a letter like the Spanish n with a tilde is a distinct letter of the Spanish alphabet and deserves separate treatment, and a few assign it its own position. There is no ancient ruling to appeal to here; the Pythagorean chart itself is a modern construction, so every accent rule is a modern extension of it. We fold accents because it is simple, reproducible, and consistent across languages.

Hyphens and spaces carry no number on this site; they are simply removed. A hyphenated surname like Silva-Santos is counted as the ten letters of Silva and Santos together. Name particles such as de, da, van, von, del and dos are counted like any other part of the name: if you enter them, their letters contribute to the total. The same goes for second and third surnames, which are standard in Spanish, Portuguese and many other naming traditions. In short, every letter you type is counted, and nothing you type is silently dropped.

Other schools handle particles differently. Some practitioners skip lowercase particles on the grounds that they are grammatical connectors rather than names, and some count only the first surname. Neither position is more authentic than the other; the tradition simply never standardized this, because it grew up around Anglo-American naming patterns where the question rarely arose. Whichever rule you prefer, apply it the same way every time, or your numbers will drift for reasons that have nothing to do with the name itself.

Take the name Jose da Silva-Santos, written with an acute accent on the e. First we fold the accent, drop the hyphen and keep every part, leaving the letters of JOSE, DA, SILVA and SANTOS. Using the Pythagorean table: J=1, O=6, S=1, E=5 gives 13, which reduces to 4. D=4, A=1 gives 5. S=1, I=9, L=3, V=4, A=1 gives 18, which reduces to 9. S=1, A=1, N=5, T=2, O=6, S=1 gives 16, which reduces to 7.

Adding the reduced parts, 4 plus 5 plus 9 plus 7 makes 25, and 2 plus 5 gives an Expression number of 7. Adding all the raw letter values first gives 52, and 5 plus 2 is also 7, so both routes agree here. Notice how much the conventions mattered along the way: dropping the particle da, or counting only one surname, would have produced a different final number from exactly the same person's name.

The classical convention in modern numerology is the full name exactly as it appears on your birth certificate, including all middle names and surnames. Practitioners who follow this line treat the birth name as the fixed reference point for core numbers like the Expression and Soul Urge, regardless of later changes. It is also the least ambiguous choice: there is exactly one birth certificate name, while nicknames and shortened forms multiply.

Schools genuinely differ on married, adopted and chosen names. Some practitioners calculate only from the birth name; others read the current legal name as the active influence and the birth name as an underlying one; still others chart both and compare. There is no evidence-based way to settle this, because numerology is a symbolic tradition rather than a measurable science. Our honest advice: pick one convention, understand what it includes, and stay with it. A consistent frame is what makes the reflection useful; switching rules between readings only produces noise.