Soul Urge number

Numerology splits a name in two. The vowels give the Soul Urge, the consonants give the Personality, and practitioners read the first as what someone actually wants and the second as what other people notice. A name whose two halves land far apart is read as belonging to someone whose surface and interior do not match, which the tradition treats as interesting rather than as a fault.

The arithmetic is the same chart used for the Expression number, applied to fewer letters. Pull out the vowels, take each one's value, add them, reduce the total, and keep 11, 22 or 33 whole if the reduction lands there. A and E are worth 1 and 5, I and O are 9 and 6, U is 3. Vowels are scarce in most names, so Soul Urge totals run low and reduce in one or two passes.

Then there is Y, which every school handles differently and few state openly. This site's rule: Y counts as a vowel unless the very next letter in the same word is A, E, I, O or U. That makes Y a vowel in Mary, Lynn and Kyle, and a consonant in Yolanda and Maya. An older rule instead asks whether the syllable has another vowel, which needs a pronunciation dictionary and gives different answers in different accents. W is never counted as a vowel here, though a minority of numerologists do count it in pairs like ow and aw.

Whichever rule you pick, one thing has to hold: each letter must land in exactly one of the two sets. If Y is allowed to count twice or not at all, the Soul Urge and the Personality stop dividing the name between them, and the two numbers no longer describe halves of anything.