According to Georges Ifrah, the origin of the 9 integers can be attributed to the ancient Indian civilization, and was adopted by subsequent civilizations in conjunction with the 0.

In the beginning, various Indians wrote 9 similar to the modern closing question mark without the bottom dot. The Kshatrapa, Andhra and Gupta started curving the bottom vertical line coming up with a 3-look-alike. The Nagari continued the bottom stroke to make a circle and enclose the 3-look-alike, in much the same way that the @ character encircles a lowercase a. As time went on, the enclosing circle became bigger and its line continued beyond the circle downwards, as the 3-look-alike became smaller. Soon, all that was left of the 3-look-alike was a squiggle. The Arabs simply connected that squiggle to the downward stroke at the middle and subsequent European change was purely cosmetic.

While the shape of the 9 character has an ascender in most modern typefaces, in typefaces with text figures the character usually has a descender, as, for example, in .

This numeral resembles an inverted 6. To disambiguate the two on objects and documents that can be inverted, the 9 is often underlined, as is done for the 6. Another distinction from the 6 is that it is sometimes handwritten with a straight stem, resembling a raised lower-case letter q.

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