Chinese numbers 1 to 100, and the hand signs

Chinese numbers 1 to 100 are built from just eleven characters: 一 二 三 四 五 六 七 八 九 十, one to ten, and 百 bǎi, a hundred. Everything in between is said the way it is written in Arabic numerals, tens first and then units: 十一 shíyī is "ten one", 11; 二十 èrshí is "two ten", 20; 九十九 jiǔshíjiǔ is "nine ten nine", 99; and 100 is 一百 yìbǎi, "one hundred". There are no teens to memorise and no irregular tens. Below are one to ten, the full table to 100, the second word for "two", the counting unit of ten thousand that English does not have, and the one-handed signs Chinese speakers use for six to ten.

Updated 27 October 2026 · 16 min read

One to ten

The "say it" column is only a guide, and what it cannot show is the tone. 一 yī, 三 sān, 七 qī and 八 bā are high and level; 十 shí and 零 líng rise; 五 wǔ and 九 jiǔ are low; 二 èr, 四 sì and 六 liù fall. Four and ten are the pair to practise: 四 sì and 十 shí differ in their first sound and in their tone, and a learner who blurs both says the wrong number. Pinyin q is a ch made with the tongue behind the lower teeth. The four tones are on one chart in the Mandarin tones.

The rule for 11 to 99

• 11 to 19 are "ten" plus a unit: 十一 shíyī (11), 十二 shí'èr (12), 十九 shíjiǔ (19). Ten on its own is 十, not "one ten".
• The tens are a unit times ten: 二十 èrshí (20), 三十 sānshí (30), 九十 jiǔshí (90).
• 21 to 99 add the unit after the tens: 二十一 èrshíyī (21), 四十五 sìshíwǔ (45), 九十九 jiǔshíjiǔ (99).
• 100 is one hundred: 一百 yìbǎi. Here the "one" is said.

That is the whole system. The table is generated by that rule, not typed, and is checked against known forms before it is printed:

The pinyin in this table, and on the rest of this page, marks each tone as it is said. That differs from a dictionary in exactly one cell: 100, which dictionaries write yībǎi and everybody says yìbǎi, for the reason explained under "The tone of 一" below. Numbers under 100 are written as one pinyin word, with an apostrophe before a syllable that starts with a vowel, as in shí'èr, so that it cannot be misread.

Two words for "two": 二 and 两

Mandarin has two words for "two", and which one you need depends on what comes next.

• 二 èr is the number: counting, phone numbers, inside bigger numbers (十二, 二十, 二十二), ordinals (第二 dì'èr, "second") and months (二月 èryuè, "February").
• 两 liǎng is "two of something". A number in front of a noun needs a measure word between them, and before a measure word "two" is 两: 两个人 liǎng ge rén, "two people", never 二个人. The same goes for 两天 liǎng tiān, "two days", 两次 liǎng cì, "twice", and 两点 liǎng diǎn, "two o'clock".
• For 200 and 2,000, either is heard: 两百 or 二百, 两千 or 二千. The Chinese Grammar Wiki teaches 两百 and 两千 and accepts 二百; Wikipedia notes that 两 is often used for numbers from 200 up, but that usage varies by dialect and speaker.

The subtitle lists bear this out. Before the commonest measure word, 个, the 两 form is said 120.2 times as often as the 二 form, and before 天, "day", 56.0 times as often. Before 百 the gap shrinks to 2.1 to one and before 千 to 2.8 to one: 两 still wins, but 二百 and 二千 are ordinary.

Some of the 二 counts are pieces of longer words that the list split apart, such as 第二天, "the next day", so they flatter 二 slightly.

Zero: 零

Zero is 零 líng, and it matters past 100, because Chinese says a gap in the middle of a number out loud: 101 is 一百零一 yìbǎi líng yī, "one hundred zero one", not "one hundred one". In the Chinese Grammar Wiki's example, 7,890,298 is 七百八十九万零二百九十八, where the 零 stands for the zero at the start of the last four digits, 0298.

There is also a written circle, 〇, read líng too, which Wikipedia describes as an informal alternative to 零. And when a number is read out digit by digit, 1 is often said yāo instead of yī, for clarity: CC-CEDICT calls yāo the "unambiguous spoken form when spelling out numbers, especially on the telephone or in the military".

Hundreds, thousands and 万

English counts big numbers in thousands: a thousand, a million (a thousand thousand). Chinese counts them in ten-thousands. Ten thousand has its own word, 万 wàn, and the everyday way to say a million is 一百万, "one hundred ten-thousands". A hundred thousand is 十万, "ten ten-thousands", and the next new word is 亿 yì, a hundred million, "ten thousand ten-thousands". So a Chinese reader groups digits in fours where English groups them in threes: 52,152 is 5,2152, 五万两千一百五十二 wǔwàn liǎngqiān yìbǎi wǔshí'èr, "five ten-thousands, two thousand, one hundred, fifty-two".

The subtitles show how central 万 is. Adding up every number word in the list that contains each unit, the ones with 万 come to 188.8 per million words, those with 百 to 121.4 and those with 千 to 96.8: ten thousand is said more often than either a hundred or a thousand. (万一, "in case", and 千万, "by all means", are left out, because both are common as non-numbers.)

Inside a bigger number, a one in the tens place is said: 112 is 一百一十二, "one hundred one ten two", where on its own 12 is plain 十二.

The tone of 一

一 is the one number whose tone moves, by the same rule that applies to the word in any sentence:

• It stays yī, high and level, when it is said on its own or counted, at the end of a word (十一 shíyī, 二十一 èrshíyī), in ordinals (第一 dìyī, "first"), and when another digit follows it directly, as in a phone number or a year.
• Before a fourth tone it becomes yí, rising: 一万 yíwàn, 一亿 yíyì, and 一个 yí ge, "one, a" (个 is a fourth tone underneath, even though it is said lightly).
• Before a first, second or third tone it becomes yì, falling: 一千 yìqiān, 一年 yì nián, "one year", and 一百 yìbǎi, because 百 is a third tone.

Dictionaries, and most pinyin outside textbooks, write the original yī everywhere and leave the reader to apply the rule; the Chinese Pronunciation Wiki puts it plainly, that the changes are "not written in the pinyin". This page writes them, so that the pinyin reads the way the number sounds.

Banker's numerals: 壹 贰 叁

The everyday characters for one, two and three are a forger's gift: one stroke turns 一 into 二 or 十. So amounts on cheques and receipts are written in a second set, the 大写 dàxiě numerals, "big writing", which CC-CEDICT glosses as "banker's anti-fraud numerals". Each is pronounced exactly like the everyday character.

Several are ordinary words borrowed for the job: 伍 is a squad of five soldiers, 拾 is "to pick up", 肆 "unrestrained", and 陆, said lù, is "land", which takes the liù reading only as a numeral. 万 and 亿 have no separate banker's form. An old story credited the set to Empress Wu Zetian: the seventeenth-century scholar Gu Yanwu wrote that she changed the characters. Bamboo manuscripts excavated in recent decades show forms like these were already in use before the Qin dynasty.

A third, older set, the Suzhou numerals 苏州码子 (〡 〢 〣 〤 〥 〦 〧 〨 〩 〸 for one to ten), was a merchant's shorthand descended from counting rods. It survives in traditional trades such as Chinese medicine, and on handwritten prices and invoices in some markets.

Chinese number hand signs

Chinese speakers carry on past five on the same hand: one to nine are signed with one hand, and ten, in the version below, by crossing two index fingers. One to five work in many countries; six to ten are symbols rather than counts, and are the ones a visitor misreads. The table follows the photographs of the Chinese system in Morrissey and colleagues' 2016 study of finger counting, whose Chinese participants were students at Northeast Normal University in Changchun.

Seven and eight are where China disagrees with itself. A 2013 report on People's Daily Online, taken from the Fujian news site 东南网, described what most of the country does as above, with the thumb, index and middle fingers pinched together for seven and the L for eight. In Fujian the L means seven, and eight is the thumb, index and middle fingers held out. Fujianese commenters said they were regularly misunderstood in other provinces. The report also quoted one Fuzhou user who used yet another seven, and someone passing on that Taiwanese friends sign seven and eight the Fujian way.

Taiwan does, and goes one further. A 2018 explainer on Taiwan's The News Lens describes the Taiwanese signs as one hand all the way from one to nine, and says one to five are understood in many countries. Seven is the thumb and index finger, as in south-east China, though in the rest of China that sign is eight. Eight is the thumb, index and middle fingers, and nine adds the ring finger, leaving only the little finger folded. The same article points out that several European countries, among them Germany, France and Spain, use those three signs for two, three and four, and that the hook for nine is the sign of the rest of China, the one a character makes in the film Let the Bullets Fly (让子弹飞) when he says he knows nine ways to kill Huang Silang.

So the L can be seven or eight depending on who you ask, and if a price matters, say it as well. We could not find a reliable source for Hong Kong's usage, so it is left out here.

Lucky and unlucky numbers

Several numbers sound like other words, and that gives them a meaning beyond the count.

None of these are exact homophones except 九 and 久: 四 sì and 死 sǐ, for instance, have different tones. They are close enough to matter in practice. Simmons and Schindler found that Chinese price advertisements favour prices ending in 8 and avoid ones ending in 4, and Hirshleifer, Jian and Zhang found more lucky numbers among Chinese stock listing codes than chance would give. The opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics began at 8 pm on 8 August 2008. Wikipedia notes that some Chinese buildings leave out the floor number 4.

250 works differently: the number itself is the word. CC-CEDICT glosses 二百五 as "idiot, stupid person, a dope". In the subtitle list it is said 0.6 times per million words, though that count cannot separate the insult from the plain number 250.

Which numbers do Chinese films say most?

Counted in 85,487,865 words of Chinese film and television subtitles, per million words:

"Alone" counts the number where the subtitles' word-splitter left it on its own. "With 个" counts it joined to the commonest measure word, as in 三个, "three (of them)". Neither column is the full story, and the caveats come first:

• Numbers written as digits are not counted. Subtitles often write 520 or 2008 as Arabic numerals, and this count keeps only tokens with a letter or character in them.
• A number inside a longer word is not counted either. 一起 "together", 一下 "a moment", 第一 "first" and 二十 "twenty" are each one token, so they are not in the row for 一 or 二.
• 一个 is mostly "a", not "one", which is why it towers over the rest of the table.

Even so, the pattern is clear. Two is said mainly as 两: 两个 is used 3.1 times as often as 三个. From three to ten, the numbers said alone fall in counting order, each less common than the one before. That differs from the European languages counted in the same way, where Spanish, French, German, Italian and Portuguese all say five more often than four, and ten more often than seven, eight and nine. In Mandarin four beats five and seven beats ten, in both columns. With 个 the order is almost the same, with two small exceptions: 八个 edges ahead of 七个, and 十个 ahead of 九个. Neither gap is big enough to credit to lucky eight.

How to learn them

1. Learn 零 and 一 to 十 with their tones, and the hand signs as you go.
2. Say 11 to 99 aloud until the rule is automatic: tens, then 十, then units.
3. Learn 两 with 个 from the start: 两个, not 二个.
4. Practise big numbers in groups of four digits, with 万 as the unit.

The numbers are in the most common Mandarin words, and the Mandarin course teaches them with prices, dates and times, free on the web. The days of the week are numbers too: days of the week in Chinese.

The same numbers in five European languages, each built by rule: Spanish, French, German, Italian and Portuguese. Why a count of Chinese "words" depends on where a computer splits them is in how many words you need to speak Mandarin.

Numbers are part of the New Year too: the 2027 dates, the Goat years and the greetings for them are on Chinese New Year 2027 greetings in Mandarin.

Sources

• The table of 1 to 100 is generated by rule by scripts/frequency_zhnumbers.py, which checks itself against a list of known forms (十一 shíyī, 十二 shí'èr, 二十 èrshí, 九十九 jiǔshíjiǔ, 一百 yìbǎi and others) before it writes anything.
• CC-CEDICT, cc-cedict.org (also served by MDBG): the readings of 零 to 十, 百, 千, 万 and 亿; 〇 líng; 幺 and 一 read yāo when spelling out numbers; each banker's numeral, 大写 as "banker's anti-fraud numerals", and the other senses of 伍, 拾, 肆 and 陆; 苏州码子 and its use in traditional trades; 发财, 死, 溜, 久 and 一生一世; 二百五 "idiot".
• AllSet Learning, Chinese Grammar Wiki: Comparing 二 and 两 (二 in counting, phone numbers, 十二, 二十, 第二 and 二月; 两 before measure words, 两点; 两百 and 两千, with 二百 also acceptable) and Big numbers in Chinese (counting in ten-thousands, 一万, 十万, 一百万, 亿, the examples 52,152 and 7,890,298).
• AllSet Learning, Chinese Pronunciation Wiki, Tone change rules: 一 before a fourth tone and before the others, and that the changes are normally not written in pinyin.
• Wikipedia, Standard Chinese phonology: when 一 keeps its first tone (final, in ordinals, before a digit).
• Wikipedia, Chinese numerals: 两 for numbers from 200 up varying by dialect and speaker; 〇; grouping by 万 and 亿; banker's numerals against forgery; Suzhou numerals for market prices and handwritten invoices.
• Wiktionary, 一百: 101 as 一百零一 and 112 as 一百一十二.
• Wikipedia (Chinese), 数字手势: the Taiwanese nine, with only the little finger folded.
• Wikipedia (Chinese), 大写数字: the traditional forms; Gu Yanwu's attribution to Empress Wu; pre-Qin bamboo-slip examples, citing 葛亮, 汉字再发现 (Shanghai, 2022), pp. 62–63; 万 and 亿 without banker's forms.
• Morrissey, K. R., Liu, M., Kang, J., Hallett, D. & Wang, Q. (2016). Cross-cultural and intra-cultural differences in finger-counting habits and number magnitude processing: Embodied numerosity in Canadian and Chinese university students. Journal of Numerical Cognition 2(1), 1–19, doi:10.5964/jnc.v2i1.14: Figure 1, the Chinese finger-counting system; Chinese students typically count on one hand.
• 民俗大不同：用手势比划7、8 福建与其他省不同 (Different customs: Fujian signs 7 and 8 differently from other provinces), People's Daily Online, 20 August 2013, from 东南网, edu.people.com.cn.
• If Lin and 游承穎, 你比的7是他的8：那些讓外國人看不懂的台灣數字手勢 (Your 7 is his 8: the Taiwanese number signs foreigners cannot read), The News Lens, 14 June 2018, thenewslens.com.
• Simmons, L. C. & Schindler, R. M. (2003). Cultural superstitions and the price endings used in Chinese advertising. Journal of International Marketing 11(2), 101–111, doi:10.1509/jimk.11.2.101.20161.
• Hirshleifer, D., Jian, M. & Zhang, H. (2018). Superstition and financial decision making. Management Science 64(1), 235–252, doi:10.1287/mnsc.2016.2584.
• Wikipedia, Numbers in Chinese culture: 6 and 溜, 9 and weddings, 520, 1314, 250 as an insult, floors skipped in some buildings; and 2008 Summer Olympics opening ceremony: 8 pm on 8 August 2008, and the number 8.
• The counts are from OpenSubtitles 2018 (Lison, P. & Tiedemann, J., 2016, aclanthology.org) through Hermit Dave's FrequencyWords list for simplified Chinese (zh_cn), content licensed CC BY-SA 4.0, github.com. They are computed by scripts/frequency_zhnumbers.py and printed from its output rather than typed.