万 (wàn) · ten thousand

Meanings

1 ten thousand
2 a great number; myriad
3 absolutely; by all means

Characters

万

wàn

ten thousand

Examples

HSK 3

这辆车十万块钱。

Zhè liàng chē shíwàn kuài qián.

This car costs 100,000 yuan.

HSK 3

万一下雨怎么办？

Wànyī xiàyǔ zěnmebàn?

What if it rains?

HSK 3

你千万不要迟到。

Nǐ qiānwàn búyào chídào.

You absolutely must not be late.

Tips

culture

Chinese counts in units of 万 (10,000) where English jumps in thousands. So 100,000 is 十万 (ten ten-thousands), 1,000,000 is 百万 (hundred ten-thousands), and 100,000,000 is 亿. Mentally regrouping digits in fours instead of threes is the single trickiest big-number habit to pick up.

history

万岁 literally means 'ten thousand years' and was the ritual cry wishing the emperor eternal life - addressing anyone else as 万岁 was treasonous. The same characters are the source of Japanese banzai.

register

Two minor extra readings exist but you rarely need them. Capitalised 万 is a Chinese surname (still read wàn). A separate reading mò survives only inside the two-character surname 万俟, historically a Xianbei tribal name. Outside that one surname, always read 万.

Components

radical

一 yī

one; horizontal cap stroke

Top horizontal is the 一 radical, which is how 万 is filed for radical-browse lookup even though the body below carries most of the visual weight. It is the cap line of the figure and the only Kangxi-listable piece in the simplified silhouette.

ideograph

万 wàn

ten thousand (lower fused body)

The two strokes hanging from the cap are a stylised residue of the traditional 萬 scorpion body, which was borrowed phonetically to write the number ten thousand. In simplified script they collapse into this indivisible curl that no longer maps to a standalone CJK glyph.