The word Dyscalculia comes from Greek and Latin which means: "counting badly". The prefix "dys" comes from Greek and means "badly". "Calculia" comes from the Latin "calculare". which means "to count". The word "calculare" again comes from "calculus", which means "pebble" or one of the counters on an abacus. Dyscalculia is a lesser known disability, similar and potentially related to dyslexia and developmental dyspraxia. Dyscalculia occurs in people who may have difficulties with time, measurement, and spatial reasoning. Current estimates suggest it may affect about 5% of the population.

Dyscalculia was originally identified in patients who suffered specific arithmetic disabilities as a result of damage to specific regions of the brain. Recent research suggests that dyscalculia can also occur developmentally, as a genetically-linked learning disability which affects a person's ability to understand, remember, or manipulate numbers or number facts. The term is often used to refer specifically to the inability to perform arithmetic operations, but it is also defined as a more fundamental inability to conceptualize numbers as abstract concepts of comparative quantities (a deficit in "number sense").

Dyscalculia can be detected at a young age and measures should be taken to ease the problems faced by them. In the way that dyslexia can be dealt with by using a slightly different approach to teaching, so can dyscalculia. -

- Dr. Sulata Shenoy