Nepali Numbers 1 to 100: Counting in Nepali

Ask a Kathmandu shopkeeper the price of something and you'll get an answer like पचास रुपैयाँ (pachaas rupaiyaa, fifty rupees), said fast, with no pause between the number and the word for rupee. If you've only memorized एक, दुई, तीन (ek, dui, tin: one, two, three) from a phrasebook, that sentence flies right past you. Nepali numbers aren't hard to learn one at a time, but they don't build the way English numbers do. Twenty-one isn't "twenty plus one" stitched together in an obvious way. It's its own word, एक्काइस (ekkaais), and so is every other number between the tens. This post walks through what's regular, what isn't, and how to actually use numbers once you know them.

Numbers 1 to 10: the foundation you'll use constantly

These ten words are worth memorizing cold before anything else, because they show up inside larger numbers, prices, phone numbers, and dates constantly.

Devanagari numeral	Digit	Nepali word	Romanization	English
१	1	एक	ek	one
२	2	दुई	dui	two
३	3	तीन	tin	three
४	4	चार	char	four
५	5	पाँच	paanch	five
६	6	छ	chha	six
७	7	सात	saat	seven
८	8	आठ	aath	eight
९	9	नौ	nau	nine
१०	10	दश	dash	ten

Say these out loud a few times before moving on. छ (chha, six) is worth a second look: it's spelled identically to the verb form छ ("is," as in तपाईंलाई कस्तो छ?, how are you), and only context tells you which one you're hearing. A learner sometimes confuses them for the first week or two.

Numbers 11 to 20: where the pattern starts to break

Here's the part that surprises people who've studied Spanish or German first. In those languages, "sixteen" is visibly "six" plus "ten." In Nepali, eleven through nineteen are their own words. You can hear faint echoes of the base digits if you listen closely (बाह्र for twelve has a trace of दुई's "b/d" sound shift, सोह्र for sixteen hints at छ), but none of it is predictable enough to derive on the fly.

Devanagari numeral	Digit	Nepali word	Romanization	English
११	11	एघार	eghaar	eleven
१२	12	बाह्र	baahra	twelve
१३	13	तेह्र	tehra	thirteen
१४	14	चौध	chaudha	fourteen
१५	15	पन्ध्र	pandhra	fifteen
१६	16	सोह्र	sohra	sixteen
१७	17	सत्र	satra	seventeen
१८	18	अठार	aathaar	eighteen
१९	19	उन्नाइस	unnaais	nineteen
२०	20	बीस	bees	twenty

Nepali speakers learn eleven through nineteen as a single memorized block in school, the same way English speakers learn multiplication tables: not derived, just drilled until automatic. Spend real time with this table before the tens, because these ten words anchor everything that follows.

The tens: बीस, तीस, चालीस, and the rest

The good news is that the decade markers, twenty, thirty, forty, and on up to a hundred, are each a single clean word, and they don't change based on what comes before or after them.

Devanagari numeral	Digit	Nepali word	Romanization	English
२०	20	बीस	bees	twenty
३०	30	तीस	tees	thirty
४०	40	चालीस	chaalis	forty
५०	50	पचास	pachaas	fifty
६०	60	साठी	saathi	sixty
७०	70	सत्तरी	sattari	seventy
८०	80	असी	asi	eighty
९०	90	नब्बे	nabbe	ninety
१००	100	सय	saya	one hundred

Keep these nine words next to the 1-10 table in your head: together they cover a surprising amount of real conversation, ages, rough prices, floor numbers, bus numbers. पचास (pachaas, fifty) and साठी (saathi, sixty) get used constantly in the kind of casual number-dropping native speakers do without thinking.

Why the numbers between the tens are irregular, not a formula

This is the part most guides gloss over, and it's exactly where guessing gets a learner in trouble. In English, once you know "twenty" and "one," you already know "twenty-one": just say them in order. Nepali doesn't work that way. Each number from 21 to 99 is closer to its own word, with a fragment of the base digit buried inside it, but not assembled by a rule you can apply on the fly.

Look at how "two" behaves across different decades. दुई on its own is "two." But two combined with twenty is बाइस (baais), with forty it's बयालीस (bayaalis), and with fifty it's बाउन्न (baaunna). Three different shapes for the same digit, depending on which decade it's attached to. Nepali, like its close relative Hindi, inherited this irregularity from the way Sanskrit and Prakrit numerals fused and wore down over centuries of everyday speech.

A few verified examples show the pattern (or really, the lack of one) clearly:

Devanagari numeral	Digit	Nepali word	Romanization	English
२१	21	एक्काइस	ekkaais	twenty-one
२५	25	पच्चीस	pachchis	twenty-five
३५	35	पैँतिस	paintis	thirty-five
४२	42	बयालीस	bayaalis	forty-two
५१	51	एकाउन्न	ekaaunna	fifty-one
६७	67	सतसट्ठी	satasatthi	sixty-seven
७८	78	अठहत्तर	aathahattar	seventy-eight
८९	89	उनान्नब्बे	unaannabbe	eighty-nine

Notice ७८ (aathahattar) carries a visible echo of आठ (aath, eight) at the front, and ८९ (unaannabbe) borrows the "unaan-" prefix that nineteen (उन्नाइस) also uses, a pattern Nepali applies to several numbers that sit one below a round decade. That's about as close as the system gets to a rule: numbers one short of a decade (19, 29, 39, and so on) often lean on an "unaan-" style prefix. Everything else has to be memorized word by word, the way a Nepali child learns them, by repetition, not derivation. If you're building this vocabulary alongside the script itself, the guide to the Devanagari script covers the letterforms these number words are built from.

Devanagari numerals versus Western digits

Nepali has its own set of digit characters, separate from the number words: ० १ २ ३ ४ ५ ६ ७ ८ ९, running 0 through 9. These aren't just stylistic variants of 0123456789, they're a distinct character set in Unicode, and they show up constantly in print. Newspapers date themselves in Devanagari numerals, price tags in local markets often use them, and official documents lean on them heavily.

Western digits (0123456789) haven't disappeared, though. Phone numbers, ATM screens, product barcodes, and most digital interfaces in Nepal use Western digits by default, the same way they do almost everywhere else now. A learner doesn't need to choose one system over the other, just recognize both: a restaurant menu might list प्रति प्लेट रु. ८० (per plate, Rs. 80) using a Devanagari numeral while the receipt printed at the register shows "80" in Western digits for the same amount.

Reading Devanagari numerals is mostly a matter of memorizing ten new shapes, since they don't resemble 0-9 visually at all. ४ (four) and ९ (nine) trip people up first: ४ looks a little like a Western "8" rotated, and ९ can momentarily read as a Western "9" even though the curve sits differently. A few sessions of deliberate practice clears that up fast.

Using numbers for prices, phone numbers, and everyday quantities

Numbers rarely show up alone in real Nepali. They attach to a unit, a currency word, or a noun, and the sentence structure around them is worth knowing early.

For prices, the pattern is [number] + रुपैयाँ (rupaiyaa, rupees), often shortened in speech to just रु. यो कति पर्छ? (yo kati parchha?, how much does this cost?) is the question; पचास रुपैयाँ (pachaas rupaiyaa, fifty rupees) or तीन सय रुपैयाँ (tin saya rupaiyaa, three hundred rupees) is a typical answer. "Three hundred" is literally तीन (three) plus सय (hundred), said as two words, one of the few places Nepali numbers compound in a way that feels intuitive to an English speaker.

"यो कति पर्छ?" "दुई सय पचास रुपैयाँ।" (Yo kati parchha? Dui saya pachaas rupaiyaa.) "How much does this cost?" "Two hundred fifty rupees."

That sentence shows how hundreds, tens, and the irregular teens or decade-numbers stack together: दुई सय (two hundred) plus पचास (fifty) reads naturally left to right, the bigger unit first, same as English.

Phone numbers are read digit by digit rather than as full multi-digit numbers, which is a relief, since it means you only need the 0-9 words, not the irregular range up to ninety-nine. A number like ९८४१२३४५६७ gets read aloud as नौ आठ चार एक दुई तीन चार पाँच छ सात (nau, aath, char, ek, dui, tin, char, paanch, chha, saat), one digit at a time, the way an English speaker reads a phone number aloud rather than treating it as a single giant quantity. That makes phone numbers far easier than prices for a beginner, since you never touch the irregular teens or compound tens to give someone your number.

For everyday quantities, the number sits directly before the noun, with no linking word needed: तीन वटा स्याउ (tin wata syau, three apples) uses वटा (wata), a counting word that attaches to most countable objects. दुई जना मान्छे (dui jana manchhe, two people) swaps in जना (jana), used specifically for counting people. You don't need every counter word on day one, but knowing that a number usually needs a small helper word before the noun will save you from sounding slightly off in your first conversations.

Building the habit: a practice reference table, 1 to 100

Use this as your drilling reference. The first hundred breaks cleanly into the blocks above: the foundation (1-10), the irregular teens (11-20), the clean decade markers (20-100), and the irregular stretch between each pair of decades, which follows the same memorize-don't-derive logic demonstrated in the 21-89 examples above rather than a single predictable formula.

Range	What to know	How to approach it
1-10	Full word list, memorize first	एक through दश, the base vocabulary for everything else
11-20	Full word list, irregular	एघार through बीस, treat as its own memorized block
20, 30, 40...100	Full word list, regular shape	बीस, तीस, चालीस...सय, each a clean standalone word
21-99 (between decades)	Pattern plus verified examples	Decade word is NOT simply followed by the 1-10 word; each number is closer to its own word, with a loose, non-formulaic echo of the base digit. Learn number by number, leaning on the "unaan-" prefix trick for numbers one below a decade (19, 29, 39...)

Treat the 21-99 range the way you'd treat irregular verbs in a European language: no shortcut formula, but repetition with real exposure, hearing prices, phone numbers, ages in actual conversation, cements them faster than memorizing all 79 in one sitting. Most learners get fluent with 1-20 and the clean decades within a couple of weeks, then pick up the in-between numbers gradually as they show up in real bargaining. If you've already worked through essential Nepali phrases for travelers, you've likely bumped into यो कति हो? (how much is this?) already; numbers are simply the words that answer it.

Putting the numbers to work

Knowing the words on a page and understanding a number thrown at you in a crowded Thamel market at conversational speed are two different skills, and only one comes from flashcards. The fastest way to close that gap is hearing numbers attached to real situations: prices shouted in a vegetable market, a guide telling you दुई घण्टा (two hours) to the next teahouse, a phone number read back digit by digit, until your ear stops translating and starts understanding. Our Learn Nepali app builds numbers into its early lessons with native-speaker audio for exactly this reason, so you're hearing पचास and साठी said at real speed rather than puzzling them out silently from a romanization chart.