[1] It was an adaptation to a similar ciphers of the Arabic script that has been used in South Asia around the 19th century.

[2][3] In Buginese literature, Lontara Bilang-bilang is sometimes used as a substitute to Lontara script in writing basa to bakke', a play-on-words, as well as élong maliung bettuanna, poetry with some hidden meaning using basa to bakke'.

In this script, each base letter in standard Lontara are substituted with forms derived from Arabic script and its numerals, with standard, unchanged Lontara vowel diacritics attached to them.

[2] For example, ب have a numeral value of 2 and therefore is substituted by a stylized form of ٢, illustrated as follows: Jawi letters for Malay and Buginese sounds are formed with dots as equivalent for its Arabic counterpart.

ج (jim) uses the form of ٣, while چ (ca) uses the form of ٣ as well but with the addition of three dots, illustrated as follows: Pre-nasal sounds are formed with the addition of a diacritic line, illustrated as follows: The Lontara Bilang-bilang Script has not yet been added into the Unicode standard as of version 14.0.