Calculations
No app required for this one, either — a pen, your full birth name, and a couple of minutes will get you there.
The math is simple. The part that actually stalls people is deciding exactly which letters count, especially in names with unusual letter combinations.
Quick answer
To find your personality number, write your full birth name, cross out every vowel, convert each remaining consonant to a number using a Pythagorean chart, add them up, and reduce the total to a single digit — unless it lands on 11, 22, or 33, which many practitioners keep as a master number.
This is a practical walkthrough of the arithmetic. Finding the number doesn't establish that it reveals anything verifiable about a person.
Overview
Arithmetic can be checked
Finding a personality number by hand is fast: write the name, cross out the vowels, add up what's left, reduce. The confusion people run into is almost never the addition — it's how to handle unusual formatting in a name, like hyphens, apostrophes, or repeated letters.
The edge cases below cover the situations that actually stall people out, rather than repeating the basic formula on its own.
Step one: write your full birth name in capital letters, with a little space between each letter.
Step two: cross out every A, E, I, O, and U. Everything left, including Y, is a consonant.
Step three: below each remaining letter, write its numeric value using the Pythagorean chart, and add the whole column up.
Step four: reduce the total by adding its digits together, repeating until you reach a single digit — unless you land on 11, 22, or 33 and you're preserving master numbers.
A name like "Smith" simply has more letters to sum than a vowel-heavy one — there's no cap or floor on how many consonants can be included.
Both letters count separately — "Kelly" contributes two L's (value 3 each), not one combined value.
Standard practice includes every letter in both parts of a hyphenated surname; the hyphen itself contributes nothing.
The apostrophe is not a letter and is skipped; every actual letter, including both O's, is still counted normally.
Verdict
Finding a personality number takes consonants, a letter chart, and one reduction pass.
Supporting Finding
Y always counts as a consonant here — decide this before you start, though it's rarely disputed.
Important Limit
Punctuation like hyphens and apostrophes doesn't count as a letter and contributes nothing to the sum.