Shanghainese numbers: counting, prices, dates and time

Shanghainese counts the way Mandarin does and sounds nothing like it. Twenty has its own word, two has two forms, and a number string is one tone domain rather than a row of syllables. Here is the whole numeral system, from zero to ten thousand.

Updated 20 September 2026 · 4 min read

Tap 🔊 to hear an example. Shanghainese examples play the recordings from Verbavia’s course, made with a Shanghainese voice; Mandarin examples play a Mandarin voice.

Zero to ten

The characters are Mandarin’s. Not one of the readings is, and several are hard to hear as numbers at all until you know them — 五 ng ‘five’ has no vowel, and 十 zeh ‘ten’ ends in a glottal stop.

The spelling is the course’s own, which is explained on the romanisation page. In Wugniu, the romanisation most reference works now use, the checked syllables end in -q rather than -h — Wiktionary gives 一 as 7iq and 十 as 7seq — and a digit in front marks the tone class. Omniglot’s table uses a third, older scheme. They are the same sounds written three ways.

Two: 两 or 二

As in Mandarin, two has a counting form and a digit form, and the rule is the same. Standing alone or before a classifier or a big unit, it is 两 lian ‘two’: 两本书 lian pen syu ‘two books’, 两百 lian pah ‘two hundred’, 两千 lian tshie ‘two thousand’. As the last digit of a longer number it is 二 nyi ‘two’: 十二 zeh nyi ‘twelve’, 廿二 nyae nyi ‘twenty-two’. The Wikivoyage Wu phrasebook adds that a year is read digit by digit and uses 两 for every 2 in it.

Eleven to ten thousand

Eleven to nineteen are ten plus the digit: 十一 zeh ih ‘eleven’, 十三 zeh sae ‘thirteen’. From thirty up, the tens are the digit plus ten: 三十 sae zeh ‘thirty’, 五十 ng zeh ‘fifty’. Twenty is the exception, and it is the number that gives Shanghainese away.

Twenty is 廿 nyae ‘twenty’ — one syllable, its own character, and the form both Omniglot and Wikivoyage give for Shanghai. Twenty-one is 廿一 nyae ih ‘twenty-one’, twenty-five 廿五 nyae ng ‘twenty-five’. Mandarin has the character too, but reads it aloud as 二十 èrshí ‘twenty’; in Shanghainese 廿 is simply what you say.

Large numbers group by ten thousand, as everywhere in Chinese: a million is a hundred 万 vae ‘ten thousand’, not a thousand thousands. If you already count in Mandarin the structure transfers whole; only the sounds are new.

What tone sandhi does to a number

A Shanghainese word is one tone domain: the first syllable’s tone sets the contour of the whole word and the other syllables lose theirs. Wikipedia’s description of the system is that it is “left-prominent and is characterized by a dominance of the first syllable over the contour of the entire tone domain”. A compound number behaves like any other compound. Say 十三 zeh sae ‘thirteen’ and it is the low tone of 十 that shapes both syllables; 三十 sae zeh ‘thirty’ takes its contour from 三 instead, so the same two syllables in the other order carry a different melody.

For a learner this is good news. You do not learn a tone per digit and then compute a string; you learn each number as a word with one shape. The general mechanism is on the tone sandhi page.

Ordinals

Ordinals put 第 di ‘-th’ in front of the number, exactly as in Mandarin: 第一 di ih ‘first’, 第三 di sae ‘third’, 第十 di zeh ‘tenth’.

Using them: prices, dates, times and ages

Numbers are only worth having because of what you do with them, and the applied system is a page of its own: what money is called, how a date and a day of the week are said, how the clock is read, and how to ask somebody’s age. All of it is on the time, dates and money page.

Counting things: the classifier is not optional

A number never sits directly on a noun. Between them goes a classifier — 两本书 lian pen syu ‘two books’, 一只猫 ih tsah 'mau ‘one cat’, 一桩事体 ih tsaon zy thi ‘one matter’ — and which classifier is a topic of its own, on the classifiers page. For a small unspecified amount there is 一眼 ih ngae ‘a little’, which Mandarin does not have.

Hand gestures

In a market the number may arrive on the fingers rather than in words, and the gestures are the ones used across mainland China rather than anything Shanghai’s own: six is thumb and little finger out, seven the thumb touching the first two fingertips, eight an L of thumb and index finger, nine a hooked index finger, and ten a closed fist or crossed index fingers. Wikipedia’s article on Chinese number gestures has the pictures.

Sources

1. Wikipedia: Shanghainese — tone sandhi (“left-prominent … dominance of the first syllable over the contour of the entire tone domain”)
2. Wikivoyage: Wu phrasebook — numbers (兩 vs 二, 廿 gniae for 20 in Shanghai), time (点, 半, 一刻), days (礼拜 + number, 礼拜日), dates (月, 号), 铜钿
3. Omniglot: Numbers in Shanghainese — the cardinal and ordinal table, 廿 for 20, grouping by ten thousand
4. Omniglot: Shanghainese phrases — 几钿？ and 价钿？ for “how much is this?”
5. Wiktionary: 一 (Wugniu 7iq)
6. Wiktionary: 十 (Wugniu 7seq)
7. Wikipedia: Chinese number gestures