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Years ago I read about a German word that meant "unusual or special number." Examples were given as 12345, 9861689 (numerical palindromes), 2468, and such. I cannot find anything like this on line and am wondering if I was tricked.

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    Palindromes are simply called das Palindrom (sg.) / die Palindrome (pl.) in German. You could call them Ziffernpalindrom or Zahlenpalindrom if they were done with digits instead of letters. That's a valid and easy to understand German word I just made up. I bet someone already used it before.
    – Janka
    Jul 30, 2018 at 23:16
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    One thing that came to my mind is "Schnapszahl".
    – Javatasse
    Jul 30, 2018 at 23:58
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    @bukwyrm: Non of the examples posted in the question is a Schnapszahl. A Schnapszahl is a number with 2 or more digits, where all digits are equal. Examples are 55, 777, 1111. The English term is "repdigit". One of Marks example is a palindrome (in German: Palindrom), the others are built from ascending digits, but I don't know any special name for this kind of numbers (neither in German nor in English). Jul 31, 2018 at 6:38
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    What is an "unusual" number? What makes a numver usual? What makes it unusual? Jul 31, 2018 at 8:31
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    @bukwyrm Der Duden agrees with Hubert's definition of Schnapszahl . There might be lokal deviations in usage, though.
    – Arsak
    Jul 31, 2018 at 15:01

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I guess you're searching for the word Zahlenmuster which means that the numbers do have a specific regularity.

There are also some math lessons where children have to search for so called ANNA, TILL and NANA regularities. ANNA numbers would be something like 8228, 9449, TILL numbers are something like 1233, 6788 and NANA numbers are something like 6767, 4545.

Zahlenpalindrom would be the word for numbers like 862268 whose number system has the same value read from the front and back.

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