万 (wàn): ten thousand

Meanings

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

Characters

万

wàn

ten thousand

Examples

这辆车十万块钱。

Zhè liàng chē shíwàn kuài qián.

This car costs 100,000 yuan.

万一下雨怎么办？

Wànyī xiàyǔ zěnmebàn?

What if it rains?

你千万不要迟到。

Nǐ qiānwàn bùyào 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.