Numbers · free
Hindi Numbers 1 to 100 — the Pattern, Not a Dump
Hindi numbers look like a hundred things to memorise. They’re not. Learn 1–20 and the round tens by heart, pick up two small rules, and the rest fall into place — here’s the shape of it.
Learn twenty numbers and ten more. The other seventy are just those, recombined.
Why they feel harder than they are
English counts in a tidy grid: twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three — one clear word, then the unit. Hindi fuses the two together and wears the seams down, so इक्कीस (ikkīs, 21) doesn’t obviously look like “one-and-twenty.” That fusion is what makes the middle numbers feel like random noise.
The trick is to stop trying to memorise all hundred. Learn 1–20 solidly and the round tens (दस, बीस, तीस … सौ). After that you only need two small rules and a handful of worked examples, and you can read a price tag or a phone number without panic.
0 to 20 — learn these outright
The foundation. Everything above 20 leans on these, so these are the ones worth drilling.
0 — zero
1 — one
2 — two
3 — three
4 — four
5 — five
6 — six
7 — seven
8 — eight
9 — nine
10 — ten
11 — eleven
12 — twelve
13 — thirteen
14 — fourteen
15 — fifteen
16 — sixteen
17 — seventeen
18 — eighteen
19 — nineteen
20 — twenty
The round tens — the other ten to learn
These are the “landmarks.” Once you know them, you can place any number in its decade.
10 — ten
20 — twenty
30 — thirty
40 — forty
50 — fifty
60 — sixty
70 — seventy
80 — eighty
90 — ninety
100 — one hundred
Rule 1 — the nines count backwards
Every number ending in 9 is built as “one short of the next ten,” using the prefix उन (un, “one less”). So 19 is उन्नीस (unnīs) — one less than 20. 29 is उनतीस (untīs) — one less than 30. 39 is उनतालीस (untālīs), 49 is उनचास (unchās), and so on.
Spot a number ending in 9 and you can guess it from the ten above it. (The lone exception is 99, which is निन्यानवे — ninyānave — worth just memorising.)
Rule 2 — unit first, then the ten
From 21 upward, the unit comes first and the ten is fused onto the end — the reverse of how it’s written in digits. Twenty-one is इक्कीस (ikkīs): a worn-down “ek + bīs.” The decade from 21 to 29 shows the shape; every other decade rhymes with it.
You won’t derive these perfectly by rule — the fusion is too irregular — but once you’ve seen one full decade, the next ones feel familiar rather than foreign.
21 to 29 — one decade, worked through
The example decade. Notice each is “unit + twenty,” squeezed together — and 29 uses the उन- backwards rule.
21 — twenty-one
22 — twenty-two
23 — twenty-three
24 — twenty-four
25 — twenty-five
26 — twenty-six
27 — twenty-seven
28 — twenty-eight
29 — twenty-nine (one less than 30)
Bigger numbers: सौ, हज़ार, लाख
Above 100 the words are clean again. सौ (sau) is hundred, हज़ार (hazār) is thousand. Then Hindi switches to the South-Asian system: instead of “million,” it counts in लाख (lākh, one hundred thousand) and करोड़ (karoṛ, ten million). A price written “₹5 लाख” is five hundred thousand rupees; “2 करोड़” is twenty million. Worth knowing, because it’s how prices, salaries and populations are spoken all over India.
The Devanagari numerals (१ २ ३) come with the letters. Learn to read them for real in the free script trainer — no account needed to start.
Learn to read the digits free →Questions people ask
Do I really have to memorise all 100 Hindi numbers?
No. Learn 1–20 and the round tens (दस, बीस, तीस … सौ) by heart — that’s thirty numbers. After that, two rules carry you a long way: numbers ending in 9 are “one less than the next ten” (उन-), and from 21 up the unit comes first, fused onto the ten. You’ll recognise far more than you can produce, which is plenty for reading prices and phone numbers.
Why does 29 (untīs) sound like it belongs to 30?
Because it does. Hindi builds the nines as “one short of the next ten” with the prefix उन (un). So 19 उन्नीस points at 20, 29 उनतीस points at 30, 39 उनतालीस at 40. Once you notice the pattern, every 9-ending number becomes guessable from the ten above it.
What is a lakh and a crore?
They’re the South-Asian counting units above a thousand. लाख (lākh) is one hundred thousand (100,000) and करोड़ (karoṛ) is ten million (10,000,000). Indian prices and salaries are almost always spoken this way — “5 lakh” rather than “500 thousand,” “2 crore” rather than “20 million.”
Are the Devanagari digits (१ २ ३) still used?
You’ll see both. The Western digits (1, 2, 3) are everywhere in modern India, but the Devanagari numerals (१, २, ३ …) still turn up on signage, in books, on currency and in traditional contexts — so it’s worth being able to read them. Our free script trainer teaches them alongside the letters.