In order to write and talk about glyphs I have created this system: A label, e.g. Da2-104, has in its first position one of the letters allocated to the objects (usually wooden tablets) which have rongorongo texts on them. The D in the example means the tablet named Échancrée.

Next position in the label indicates which side (mostly the rongorongo objects have two) the glyph is located on. One of the sides is called a and the other b. (Which is which is just a matter of convention.) After this letter there is a number and this is the ordinal number of the row. I.e. in row no. 2 on side a of Échancrée we will find the glyph referred to in the example.

Then comes a hyphen to isolate the number of the row from the number of the glyph in the row. Normally the glyphs in a row are numbered beginning with no.1 and then proceeding with ordinal numbers until the end of the row is reached. The last glyph in the row will then have a number indicating not only its position in the row but also how many glyphs there are in the row.

Sometimes, though, glyphs are obliterated. If that is the case, my convention is to start anew from the glyph which first appears beyond the destroyed area. But then this first glyph will not be no. 1 but no. 101, indicating that there is a gap to the left. In the example above we can see that there are glyphs obliterated to the left of no. 104 and that this is glyph no. 4 to the right of the destroyed area. Had the number been 204, this would have indicated that there were two areas with obliterated glyphs to the left (and that the glyph was no. 4 after the second obliterated area).

This method makes it possible, should with new techniques some obliterated glyphs be recovered, to number such with e.g. 98 and 99, i.e. without changing the numbers for the earlier seen and numbered glyphs.