9 (nine) is the natural number following 8 and preceding 10.
According to Georges Ifrah, the origin of the 9 integers can be attributed to ancient Indian civilization, and was adopted by subsequent civilizations in conjunction with the 0.
In probability, the nine is a logarithmic measure of the probability of an event, defined as the negative of the base-10 logarithm of the probability of the event's complement.[citation needed] For example, an event that is 99% likely to occur has an unlikelihood of 1% or 0.01, which amounts to −log10 0.01 = 2 nines of probability. Zero probability gives zero nines (−log10 1 = 0). A 100% probability is considered to be impossible in most circumstances: that results in infinite improbability. The effectivity of processes and the availability of systems can be expressed (as a rule of thumb, not explicitly) as a series of "nines". For example, "five nines" (99.999%) availability implies a total downtime of no more than five minutes per year – typically a very high degree of reliability; but never 100%.
In the beginning, various Indians wrote 9 similar to the modern closing question mark without the bottom dot. The Kshatrapa, Andhra and Gupta started curving the bottom vertical line coming up with a 3-look-alike. The Nagari continued the bottom stroke to make a circle and enclose the 3-look-alike, in much the same way that the @ character encircles a lowercase a. As time went on, the enclosing circle became bigger and its line continued beyond the circle downwards, as the 3-look-alike became smaller. Soon, all that was left of the 3-look-alike was a squiggle. The Arabs simply connected that squiggle to the downward stroke at the middle and subsequent European change was purely cosmetic.
This numeral resembles an inverted 6. To disambiguate the two on objects and documents that can be inverted, the 9 is often underlined, as is done for the 6. Another distinction from the 6 is that it is sometimes handwritten with a straight stem, resembling a raised lower-case letter q.