Dwarf thornal

Dwarf thornal is a special instance of a base-24 numeral system created for legibility. It is one of three numeral bases—the others being thornal and base 64—that lie outside the alphanumeric natural base set, of which binary, octal, decimal and hexadecimal are members. It was created originally for legibility on licence plates, achieved by the removal of several letters and numbers that often resemble other characters on licence plate typefaces.

History

Dwarf thornal owes its name to its big sister thornal, whose name was coined by Scottish programmer Jamie Christie some time around 2015.

While working as a security guard without access to any electronics, Alexander devised a subset of the alphanumeric with certain letters and numbers removed due to their perceived illegibility on licence plates. It turned out that when all the contentious characters were removed, exactly 24 characters remained, making it obviously suitable for use in computer science.

Characters

This is the official ordered list of characters used in dwarf thornal notation, laid out in an 8 by 3 grid for convenience. The order flows from left to right, then top to bottom.

1	2	4	6	7	9	A	C
F	G	J	K	L	M	N	P
R	T	U	V	W	X	Y	Z