Numbers - Chinese Number Character
There are characters representing the numbers zero through nine, and other characters representing larger numbers such as tens, hundreds, thousands and so on. There are two sets of characters for Chinese numerals: one for everyday writing and one for use in commercial or financial contexts known as dàxiě (simplified Chinese: 大写; traditional Chinese: 大寫). The latter arose because the characters used for writing numerals are geometrically simple, so simply using those numerals cannot prevent forgeries in the same way spelling numbers out in English would. A forger could easily change everyday characters 三十 (30) to 五千 (5000) by adding just a few strokes. That would not be possible when writing using the financial characters 叁拾 (30) and 伍仟 (5000).
T denotes Traditional, S denotes Simplified.
| Financial | Normal | Value | Pīnyīn | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 零 | 〇 | 0 | líng | 〇 is a common informal way to represent zero, but the traditional 零 is more often used in schools. 〇 is not a standard Chinese character, because Chinese characters never contain ovals (only boxes). In Unicode, 〇 is treated as a Chinese symbol or punctuation, rather than a Chinese ideograph. |
| 壹 | 一 | 1 | yī | also 弌 (obsolete financial), can be easily manipulated into 弍 (two) or 弎 (three). |
| 貳 (T) or 贰 (S) |
二 | 2 | èr | also 弍 (obsolete financial), can be easily manipulated into 弌 (one) or 弎 (three). also 兩 (T) or 两 (S), see Characters with regional usage section. |
| 叄 (T) or 叁 (S) |
三 | 3 | sān | also 弎 (obsolete financial), can be easily manipulated into 弌 (one) or 弍 (two). also 參(T) or 参(S) sān. |
| 肆 | 四 | 4 | sì | also 䦉 (obsolete financial) |
| 伍 | 五 | 5 | wǔ | |
| 陸 (T) or 陆 (S) |
六 | 6 | liù | |
| 柒 | 七 | 7 | qī | |
| 捌 | 八 | 8 | bā | |
| 玖 | 九 | 9 | jiǔ | |
| 拾 | 十 | 10 | shí | Although some people use 什 as financial, it is not ideal because it can be easily manipulated into 伍 (five) or 仟 (thousand). |
| 佰 | 百 | 100 | bǎi | |
| 仟 | 千 | 1,000 | qiān | |
| 萬 | 萬 (T) or 万 (S) |
104 | wàn | Chinese numbers group by ten-thousands see Reading and transcribing numbers section below. |
| 億 | 億 (T) or 亿 (S) |
108 | yì | See large numbers section below. |
