Music Cataloging at Yale ♪ Language tools. Note: this page was created with music cataloging in mind. See also Numbers in languages other than French, German, Italian, and Spanish Lots of German numbers and Find French words for numbers.

Please find below many ways to say three in different languages. This is the translation of the word 'three' to over 80 other languages.

Language	Ways to say three
Albanian	tre	[edit]
Basque	hiru	[edit]
Belarusian	тры	[edit]
Bosnian	tri	[edit]
Bulgarian	три	[edit]
Catalan	3	[edit]
Croatian	tri	[edit]
Czech	tři	[edit]
Danish	tre	[edit]
Dutch	drie	[edit]
Estonian	kolm	[edit]
Finnish	kolme	[edit]
French	Trois	[edit]
Galician	tres	[edit]
German	drei	[edit]
Greek	τρία (tría)	[edit]
Hungarian	három	[edit]
Icelandic	Þrír	[edit]
Irish	trí	[edit]
Italian	tre	[edit]
Latvian	trīs	[edit]
Lithuanian	trys	[edit]
Macedonian	три	[edit]
Maltese	tliet	[edit]
Norwegian	tre	[edit]
Polish	trzy	[edit]
Portuguese	três	[edit]
Romanian	Trei	[edit]
Russian	три (tri)	[edit]
Serbian	три (tri)	[edit]
Slovak	tri	[edit]
Slovenian	tri	[edit]
Spanish	Tres	[edit]
Swedish	tre	[edit]
Ukrainian	три (try)	[edit]
Welsh	tri	[edit]
Yiddish	דרייַ	[edit]

Language	Ways to say three
Armenian	երեք	[edit]
Azerbaijani	üç	[edit]
Bengali	তিন	[edit]
Chinese Simplified	三 (sān)	[edit]
Chinese Traditional	三 (sān)	[edit]
Georgian	სამ	[edit]
Gujarati	ત્રણ	[edit]
Hindi	तीन	[edit]
Hmong	peb	[edit]
Japanese	三	[edit]
Kannada	ಮೂರು	[edit]
Kazakh	үш	[edit]
Khmer	បី	[edit]
Korean	세 (se)	[edit]
Lao	ສາມ	[edit]
Malayalam	മൂന്ന്	[edit]
Marathi	तीन	[edit]
Mongolian	гурван	[edit]
Myanmar (Burmese)	သုံး	[edit]
Nepali	तीन	[edit]
Sinhala	තුන්	[edit]
Tajik	се	[edit]
Tamil	மூன்று	[edit]
Telugu	మూడు	[edit]
Thai	สาม	[edit]
Turkish	üç	[edit]
Urdu	تین	[edit]
Uzbek	uch	[edit]
Vietnamese	số ba	[edit]

Language	Ways to say three
Arabic	ثلاثة (thlath)	[edit]
Hebrew	שְׁלוֹשָׁה	[edit]
Persian	سه	[edit]

Language	Ways to say three
Afrikaans	drie	[edit]
Chichewa	atatu	[edit]
Hausa	uku	[edit]
Igbo	atọ	[edit]
Sesotho	tse tharo	[edit]
Somali	saddex	[edit]
Swahili	tatu	[edit]
Yoruba	mẹta	[edit]
Zulu	ezintathu	[edit]

Language	Ways to say three
Cebuano	tulo	[edit]
Filipino	tatlo	[edit]
Indonesian	tiga	[edit]
Javanese	telung	[edit]
Malagasy	telo	[edit]
Malay	tiga	[edit]
Maori	e toru	[edit]

Language	Ways to say three
Esperanto	tri	[edit]
Haitian Creole	twa	[edit]
Latin	tribus	[edit]

• three

Updated: Lots of folks on Reddit pointed out some mistakes in the Spanish calculations, and helped me figure out the solutions, so the Spanish graphs are now updated. The Spanish calculator is now live!

Building off of the last post about Counting to One Million in English, I received some comments about looking at other languages. That seemed like a very good idea, so I looked at a list of the world’s most popular languages and saw Chinese and Spanish listed with English in the Top 3. Having a little experience with both of those, I set out to compare how long it’d take to count in each of these languages, if you had to pronounce every single number from one to one million.

Again, here’s the plot of the number of syllables per number for English. The longest word is seven hundred seventy seven thousand seven hundred seventy seven (20 syllables).

Here is the equivalent plot for Spanish. It’s maximum is lower than English, the maximum is 19 syllables. 444,441 (cuatrocientos cuarenta y cuatro mil cuatrocientos cuarenta y uno) is the first of many numbers with that many syllables. (This assumes that you don’t pronounce the “y”, apparently it merges with the previous vowel). However, it still has a slightly higher average number of syllables when counting to one million. Click here to go to the Spanish counting app.

Here is the plot for Chinese. It exhibits much more uniformity than the other two languages (mainly because all of the component number words have 1 syllable, i.e. 1-10,100,1000,10000). You just put them together to make larger and larger numbers. As a result, the maximum number of syllables is only 11! The first number with 11 syllables is 211111 (二十一万一千一百一十一Sd gundam papercraft template. èr shí yī wàn yī qiān yī bǎi yī shí yī ) and as you’ll see in later plots, almost half of the Chinese numbers between one and one million have 11 syllables.

This graph shows the comparison of the cumulative average number of syllables between one to one million. Spanish is consistently higher than the other languages in number of syllables, though only slightly more syllables than English. Chinese, on the other hand, is consistently lower.

The Devanagari range in serif is from the Velthuis TeX font, while the range in sans is based on Gargi; Bengali and Gurmukhi ranges are based on Harsh Kumar's BharatBhasha project and others. The Gujarati and Oriya ranges are based on Samyak fonts. Octave font. The range is based on the Ethiopic metafont project at the.

The total number of syllables needed to count to one million in English is 13,198,003; in Spanish it is 14,486,000 and only 10,149,985 in Chinese.

This graph compares Spanish and Chinese to English by dividing the cumulative number of syllables between one and a number in Spanish or Chinese to the same value in English. We can see that if you make it to one million in Spanish, will have spoken about 10% more syllables that you would have in English. But Chinese is a very syllable-efficient language and you’ll have spoken about 20% fewer syllables than English in counting to one million.

This last graph is a bit more interactive (thankfully) since I’m not plotting 1 million points (or more). It shows a histogram of the syllables in the numbers up to one million in different languages. As stated before, nearly half the numbers in Chinese in this range have exactly 11 syllables, whereas the distributions for English and Spanish are shifted towards higher syllable counts and show a broader distributions of syllables. English has a moderately high peak at 14, while Spanish has a broader peak. You can double click on a language in the legend to isolate the distribution for that language or single click to remove that language.

I will also be creating the count to one million/billion/trillion calculators for the two additional languages (Spanish and Chinese) as well in the coming days.

Data sources and tools: Lots of web searches to better understand the numbering systems for Chinese and Spanish. This info was used to create a program that could calculate the number of syllables for any number between one and 1 trillion in Javascript. Because of the number of points on the the first 5 plots (either 2 and 3 million), I used R (R Studio) to make static plots to embed in this post. The last javascript plot is made using the open source plot.ly engine.

Update: fixed small issue with Chinese number calculation. Fixed mistaken number of Spanish syllables in seis (1 instead of 2), siete (2 instead of 3), nueve (2 instead of 3), cientos (2 instead of 3), etc. . . Also fixed issue so that “uno” changes to “un” before “millon” and “billon” and “y” is not counted as a syllable.

Footnotes [ + ]

1.

↑

corrected from my earlier calculation of 18.5 million. I’ve been learning lots about Spanish syllables and diphthongs. I had mistakenly said that “siete, nueve, cientos” and other numbers have 3 syllables, whereas they only have 2. Also, I had assumed that the “y” between numbers wass pronounced separately.

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