Chinese Number Converter
Read 二百三十五 or ￥2.35万 as ordinary digits, and turn digits back into Chinese. It handles the money shorthand you meet on price tags, where 万 and 亿 do most of the work.
Why Chinese prices look so short
Chinese counts in groups of four digits rather than three. 万 is ten thousand and 亿 is a hundred million, so a price written 2.35万 is 23,500, and 1.5亿 is 150 million. There is no comma grouping to help you, which is why 35000 and 3.5万 are the same number written two ways.
Below a hundred million, everything else works the way you would expect: 十 is ten, 百 is a hundred, 千 is a thousand.
The forms this converter handles
- Plain Chinese numerals: 二百三十五 reads as 235.
- 万 and 亿: 一万零五百 reads as 10,500.
- Price shorthand: ￥2.35万 reads as 23,500. Currency symbols and 元 are ignored.
- The spoken form: 3万5 means 35,000, not 30,005. When someone says it out loud, the trailing digit is the next unit down.
- 两 instead of 二: both mean two, and 两百 is 200.
- Digits to Chinese: type 1234 and get 一千二百三十四, which is how you would read it out.
Reading a price out loud
If you need to say a number, the safest route is to type it here, read the Chinese, and show the screen. Chinese numerals are regular enough that saying them is easier than it looks, but getting 万 wrong by a factor of ten is an expensive mistake.
For large amounts, prices in China are often quoted in 万 verbally even when the tag shows full digits. 三十万 is 300,000, which is 30 万, not 3 万.
Numbers you should recognise on sight
- 110 police, 119 fire, 120 ambulance. Say 幺 (yāo) instead of 一 for the digit one on a phone.
- 4 and 14 are avoided in prices and gifts because 四 sounds like 死, to die.
- 8, 18 and 88 are welcome because 八 sounds like 发, to prosper. See the number symbolism tool for the rest.