The Lexicon
A small dictionary of the words and numbers you'll meet in your readings. Definitions written plainly, with examples where useful.
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An older Mesopotamian assignment of letters to numbers based on sound rather than alphabetical position. The digit 9 is left out, treated as sacred. Practitioners find Chaldean readings more intimate, though the system is harder to apply consistently across Latin-script languages.
The counterpart to a Pinnacle. Calculated by subtraction rather than addition of date parts. A Challenge names the obstacle that recurs in a given life stage, the lesson that, if you do not learn it, keeps showing up in different costumes.
Sometimes called the Destiny number. Computed from every letter of your full birth name converted to a digit, then reduced. It is read as the natural shape your effort takes when you are unselfconscious: what comes out when nobody is watching you perform.
An older Pythagorean idea: certain intermediate sums (13, 14, 16, 19) on the way to a reduced digit are read as carrying a debt from prior lifetimes. Whether you accept reincarnation literally or as a metaphor, the figures point to recurring lessons that arrive in similar shapes.
The Life Path is the single digit (or master number) derived by reducing your full birth date. Numerologists treat it as the broadest description of how you tend to move through the world, the kind of work that suits you, the textures of decision-making you fall back on under pressure.
ExampleA person born on 14 March 1992 sums 1+4+3+1+9+9+2 = 29, then 2+9 = 11, kept as the master number 11.
11, 22, and 33 are kept un-reduced in most modern systems. They are read as amplified versions of their reduced single digits (2, 4 and 6), carrying both heightened sensitivity and a higher load. Numerologists do not always agree where the list of masters ends.
Two-digit numbers in which the same figure repeats (11, 22, 33) or in which the digits are reverses of each other (12 and 21, 13 and 31). In compatibility readings, mirrors between two people are read as a sign that the same lesson is showing up from opposite angles.
The full sweep from a Personal Year 1 to a Personal Year 9, after which the count restarts. Reading a life as a stack of nine-year arcs often makes sense of why certain decades feel like one piece. The last year of a cycle is for clearing, not for starting new things.
The operation of adding the digits of a multi-digit number together until only one digit remains. Master numbers (11, 22, 33) are usually held back from the final step. Reduction is the basic engine behind every Life Path, Expression and Personal Year calculation.
Example29 reduces as 2+9 = 11. If you do not preserve masters, you continue: 1+1 = 2.
The practice of comparing two people's Life Path, Expression and Soul Urge numbers to describe the texture of their relationship. The point is rarely to declare a pair good or bad. It is to name the places where the two move at different speeds, and where they meet easily.
The lineage runs from Babylonian Chaldea through Pythagorean Greece, into Jewish gematria and Christian arithmology in the Middle Ages, then resurfaces in the modern self-help era through writers like L. Dow Balliett and Florence Campbell in early twentieth-century America. What you read on Karmogram sits in that long, uneven conversation.
Your Personal Month plus the calendar day. Used for daily rhythm, signing dates, picking a launch day. Treat it the way a sailor treats the wind report: useful at the margin, not a substitute for knowing what you are doing.
Your Personal Year plus the current calendar month, reduced to a digit. Used for medium-grain planning. Some readers swear by it; others find it noisy compared to the Personal Year. If a single month feels uncharacteristic for your year, this number often explains why.
A single digit (1 through 9) derived by adding your birth day, birth month and the current calendar year, then reducing. It describes the dominant flavour of the year as you experience it. Year 1 begins something. Year 9 closes something. The pattern repeats every nine years.
ExampleBorn 14 March, currently 2026: 1+4+3+2+0+2+6 = 18, then 1+8 = 9. A closing year.
Calculated from the consonants of your full name. Where the Soul Urge is interior, the Personality number is the impression you leave on a stranger in the first five minutes. Useful when read in the same breath as the Soul Urge to see the gap between what you feel and what you project.
One of four extended life stages, each governed by a single number derived from the birth date. The first Pinnacle covers roughly the first thirty years; the last carries you to the end. Pinnacles are slower than Personal Years and describe shifts in what life is asking of you.
Greek philosopher of the sixth century BCE whose followers held that number is the principle of all things. The Pythagoreans treated arithmetic, music and the order of the cosmos as one subject. Modern numerology takes its name and its appetite for symbolism from them, though most of the actual techniques are much later.
The dominant Western letter-to-number scheme, mapping A through Z onto the digits 1 through 9 in order, wrapping around. Most English-language name readings use it. Its main strength is simplicity. Its main weakness is that it ignores phonetic weight.
The single digit at the bottom of any reduction is the root. It is what most readings end up speaking about, because it sits closest to the question of disposition. The intermediate sums above the root carry colour, but the root is the home key.
Built from the vowels of your full name. The Soul Urge tries to name what motivates you below the surface, before social training intervenes. It is the part of a name reading that tends to surprise people, because vowels carry less of the public face of a word.
