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In many parts of the world English is often used as a sort of international second language but there are still hundreds of languages in use worldwide and we are far from a consensus on a universal way of speaking as a human race. When it comes to numbers though the vast majority of the planet uses the same system. But how and why did Arabic numerals come to be so widely used. The answer may lie in the House of Wisdom. Adrienne Bernhard is a Freelance Writer who has recently being writing about this subject for the BBC