Vietnamese Numbers — The Complete Guide
Vietnamese numbers are wonderfully logical once you understand the system. Unlike English, which has irregular forms (eleven, twelve, thirteen), Vietnamese numbers follow a consistent pattern that makes counting to millions straightforward once you know the basics. Most searches for "Vietnamese numbers" come from people preparing to travel to Vietnam, where knowing prices and bargaining requires real number fluency.
Numbers 1–10
These are the building blocks. Every other number is built from these ten:
Tens: 11–99
The pattern for tens is beautifully simple: tens digit + mươi + units digit. The word "mươi" (without accent) is used for 20–90, while "mười" (with accent) is used for 10–19.
Important: when 5 appears in the units position after mươi, it changes from năm to lăm. So 25 = hai mươi lăm, not hai mươi năm. And 1 in the units position becomes mốt (not một) after mươi — so 21 = hai mươi mốt.
Hundreds, Thousands and Millions
Vietnamese đồng prices often drop the last three zeros in speech. A coffee costing 25,000 đồng is just "hai mươi lăm nghìn" (twenty-five thousand). When someone says "năm mươi" for a price, they usually mean 50,000 đồng — not 50. Context is everything.
Ordinal Numbers (1st, 2nd, 3rd...)
Ordinal numbers are formed by adding thứ before the cardinal number: