Ideographic Tally Mark Three

Each stroke of 正 counts one; five strokes complete it.

Where Europeans and Americans draw four bars and strike them through, people across East Asia write 正, a character with exactly five strokes, adding one stroke per vote, point or item. The strokes go in normal writing order: the top bar, the middle vertical, a short bar to its right, the left vertical, then the bottom bar. After three strokes the half-built character looks like 𝍴, a 下 with a short tick instead of a dot. Classroom elections tallied on a blackboard, counting ballots and keeping score at a game are the classic scenes.

A finished 正 means five, so 正正𝍴 reads as thirteen. Chinese calls the method 画正字 ("drawing 正"), Japanese 正の字, and Korean speakers know it as counting with 바를 정 (the character 正).

Handwriting never needed special symbols, but typed text did. Unicode added five dedicated tally marks, 𝍲 to 𝍶, so a document can show a group that stopped at one, two, three or four strokes without borrowing a real word.