Shanghainese slang, and the words you will actually hear

Shanghai spent a century as a treaty port and it shows in the vocabulary. Some of this slang is a hundred years old, some of it is English wearing Chinese characters, and a good deal of it has escaped into Mandarin.

Updated 20 September 2026 · 5 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.

Before the list

Two warnings, both practical. Slang dates faster than anything else in a language, so some of what follows is what an older Shanghai person says and some is current; where that is known it is marked. And slang is the part of a language where a learner is most likely to misjudge the register — a word that is affectionate between friends is an insult from a stranger. Listen for a while before using any of it.

Everything here is written in the romanisation this site uses; if the spellings look unfamiliar, the romanisation page explains how to read them in nine rules.

Praise

嗲 tia ‘lovely’ is worth a sentence of its own. It has no good single-word translation — somewhere between charming, stylish and adorable — and it is the word most often reached for to describe Shanghai itself. It has spread into Mandarin, where it keeps the coquettish end of the meaning and loses the approving one.

Criticism

Mild, and useful to recognise rather than to deploy.

十三点 zeh sae tie ‘scatty’ is the one you are most likely to hear, and it is not quite an insult and not quite a joke. Said of someone behaving foolishly, often affectionately, often about a woman — which is why a learner should recognise it and leave it alone.

The English layer

This is the part that is peculiar to Shanghai. The city’s trade brought in English and French words through Chinese Pidgin English, written in characters chosen for their sound, and several escaped into standard Chinese and are now used by people who have no idea where they came from. Qian Nairong and colleagues document the set; these are some of them.

Two more from the same source are too good to leave out even though the course does not teach them: 骯三 aon se, meaning shoddy or disgusting, is from English on sale; and 罗宋 lu son, from Russian, survives across Chinese in 罗宋汤 — borscht. The direct greetings borrowed straight over, 谷貓迎 for good morning and 谷拿脱 for good night, belong to an older Shanghai and you will not hear them now.

Things people do

白相 bah sian ‘to play’ is not really slang — it is simply the ordinary Shanghainese word, and it is on the list because it is one of the commonest words that differs from Mandarin. A learner who says 玩 has said something perfectly comprehensible and unmistakably not Shanghainese. Others in that category are on the Shanghainese vs Mandarin page.

Swearing

Factually, briefly, and with no examples beyond what you need to recognise.

The strongest common Shanghainese insults are built on two words. 赤佬 tshah lau ‘a wretch’ originally meant a ghost or a corpse and is now a contemptible person — roughly bastard, and genuinely rude. 瘪三 pih sae ‘a bum’ means a destitute person who begs or steals, and by extension an idiot; it is the one that escaped into Mandarin, where it is milder. Both are commonly preceded by an intensifier, and both are used between friends in a way they are not between strangers.

There is a larger vocabulary below those, and it is not listed here — not out of delicacy but because a list of insults is the least useful thing a learner can carry. You will not need to produce them, and hearing them in context is how you will learn what they weigh.

One thing genuinely worth knowing: 帮帮忙 paon paon maon ‘give me a break’ looks like a polite request for help and is almost always a rebuke, said to someone being unreasonable. It is the commonest way for a learner to say the opposite of what they meant. If you want help, use 请问 tshin ven ‘excuse me’.

The internet layer

Shanghainese slang online behaves differently from spoken slang, because writing it down means choosing characters — and there is no agreed way to write several of the commonest words. So written Shanghainese on social media is full of Mandarin near-homophones standing in for Shanghainese words: lemon, 柠檬 in standard Chinese, gets written 人门 because those characters read nyin men in Shanghainese, and yellow 黄 is written 王 because both are waon.

This is the same instinct as English l8r or kthx, and it means that reading Shanghainese online needs an ear rather than a dictionary: you have to sound the characters out in Shanghainese and hear what was meant. Two more habits to expect — a purpose-made character that many keyboards cannot type, so people write a simpler one instead (the question particle 𠲎 becomes plain 伐 va), and words squeezed into a single invented character, like 覅 viau ‘don’t’ for 勿 veh ‘not’ plus 要 iau ‘to want’.

Why none of this ever settled into a standard is the subject of the writing page, and where the borrowed half of this vocabulary came from — the concessions, the docks and a pidgin named after a creek — is on the loanwords page.

How to actually pick this up

Slang is the one part of a language that cannot be learned from a list, including this one. What the list is for is recognition — so that when you hear 老结棍 lau cih kuen ‘amazing’ you know you have been complimented and not threatened.

For production, the order that works is: get the sounds right first, learn the common words in frequency order, and let the slang arrive from listening. A learner with a good accent and plain vocabulary is treated far better than one with slang and a Mandarin accent. What to watch and listen to is on the screen and song page; the broader list is on the resources page, and what to say on a trip is on the phrases page.

Sources

1. Qian, N., Tang, Z. and Xu, B. (2007), on Western loanwords in Wu, including 沙发, 巧克力, 引擎, 凡士林, 骯三 and 罗宋 — cited in Wikipedia: Wu Chinese.
2. Wikipedia: Shanghainese, on writing Shanghainese with Mandarin near-homophones (人门 for 柠檬, 王 for 黄)
3. Wiktionary: 嗲
4. Wiktionary: 結棍
5. Wiktionary: 白相
6. Wiktionary: 十三點
7. Wiktionary: 赤佬
8. Wiktionary: 癟三
9. Wiktionary: 老虎窗
10. Wiktionary: 嘎三胡
11. Language Log: ‘Bang bang mang’ (2013), on 帮帮忙