Pinyin table


This pinyin table is a complete listing of all Hanyu Pinyin syllables used in Standard Chinese. Each syllable in a cell is composed of an initial and a final. An empty cell indicates that the corresponding syllable does not exist in Standard Chinese.
The below table indicates possible combinations of initials and finals in Standard Chinese, but does not indicate tones, which are equally important to the proper pronunciation of Chinese. Although some initial-final combinations have some syllables using each of the five different tones, most do not. Some utilize only one tone.
Pinyin entries in this page can be compared to syllables using the Zhuyin phonetic system in the Zhuyin table page.
Finals are grouped into subsets a, i, u and ü.
i, u and ü groupings indicate a combination of those finals with finals from Group a. Certain combinations are treated in a special way:
Most syllables are a combination of an initial and a final. However, some syllables have no initials. This is shown in Pinyin as follows:
  • if the syllable begins with an i, it is replaced with a y
  • if the syllable begins with an u, it is replaced with a w
  • if the syllable begins with an ü, it is replaced with yu
  • exceptions to the rules above are indicated by yellow in the table's no initial column:
Note that the y, w, and yu replacements above do not change the pronunciation of the final in the final-only syllable. They are used to avoid ambiguity when writing words in pinyin. For example, instead of:
  • "uan" and "ian" forming "uanian", which could be interpreted as:
  • *"uan-ian"
  • *"uan-i-an" or
  • *"u-an-i-an"
  • the syllables are instead written "wan" and "yan", which results in the more distinct "wanyan".
There are discrepancies between the Bopomofo tables and the pinyin table due to some minor differences between the Mainland standard, putonghua, and the Taiwanese standard, guoyu, in the standard readings of characters. For example, the variant sounds 挼, 扽, 忒 are not used in guoyu. Likewise the variant sound 孿 is not recognized in putonghua, or it is folded into. A few readings reflect a Standard Chinese approximation of a regionalism that is otherwise never encountered in either putonghua or guoyu. For instance, is a borrowing from Shanghainese that are commonly used, and are thus included in most large dictionaries, even though it is usually labeled as a nonstandard regionalism, with the local reading viau, which is approximated in Standard Chinese as fiào.

Overall table

Syllables in italics are considered nonstandard, and only exist in the form of regionalisms, neologisms or slang.
Final is in Group a or is a direct combination of:
  • i+Group a final
  • u+Group a final
  • ü+Group a finalFinal of i, u, ü group is a modified combination of:
  • i+Group a final
  • u+Group a final
  • ü+Group a finalsyllable is direct combination of initial and final syllable is modified combination of initial and final
There are also a very small number of syllables consisting only of consonants: m, n, ng, hm, hng.

Erhua contraction

Additional syllables in pinyin exist to represent the erhua phenomenon by combining the affected syllable with an -r ending, rather than transcribing 兒/儿 as a separate ér syllable. This can be seen as analogous to certain contractions in English such as "they're" in place of "they are".
Original characters那裡、那里人緣、人缘兒媳婦、儿媳妇
Original pinyinnàlirényuánérxífu
Erhua characters那兒、那儿人緣兒、人缘儿兒媳婦兒、儿媳妇儿
Erhua pinyinnàrrényuánrérxífur