Every number has a distance from zero, and that distance is never negative — that is the entire idea of absolute value, written with the familiar vertical bars as |x|. The absolute value of -7 is 7, the absolute value of 3.14 is 3.14, and the absolute value of -100 is 100. It sounds almost too simple to need a calculator, but the concept quietly powers a huge amount of real math: distances on a number line, error measurements that must stay positive, and the magnitudes inside physics and finance formulas. This page takes your entry in the Number (x) field — positive or negative, whole or decimal — and returns |x|, described in the help text as the distance from zero on the number line, along with -|x|, the negative absolute value, which flips that distance below zero. Students meet absolute value in middle-school algebra and keep meeting it in calculus, statistics, and programming, where functions like abs() do exactly this. Try -7 first and watch both outputs: 7 and -7.

With the pre-filled defaults — Number (x) -7 — the Absolute Value Calculator returns |x| 7.00000000, -|x| -7.00000000. Change any input and those results update instantly, so you can see exactly how each number you enter moves the answer.