Nepali Vocabulary

Numbers Beyond the Basics

Once the numbers 1–10 are comfortable, the next milestone is the irregular run from 11 to 99 — genuinely one of the more tedious parts of Nepali vocabulary, since unlike many languages there is no clean "ten-plus-one" pattern for most of this range. Ekkais (21), baais (22), teis (23) and so on each have to be learned essentially as individual words, the same way English speakers just memorize "eleven" and "twelve" rather than deriving them from "ten-one" and "ten-two."

The good news is that the system regularizes again at 100: saya means hundred, and from there Nepali combines numbers predictably — dui saya (200), tin saya (300) — so once you push through the irregular 11–99 range, larger numbers become straightforward pattern application rather than more memorization.

Time Vocabulary

Common Adjectives for Everyday Description

A working set of adjectives — big, small, good, bad, hot, cold, expensive, cheap — lets you describe almost anything you encounter, from food to weather to prices at a market. Nepali adjectives typically come before the noun they describe, similar to English: ठूलो घर (thulo ghar, big house), where ठूलो (thulo, big) precedes घर (ghar, house).

Unlike verbs, most basic Nepali adjectives do not change form based on the gender or number of the noun they describe in casual speech, which makes them comparatively easy to add to your vocabulary without worrying about agreement rules — a welcome simplicity after the complexity of the honorific and verb-conjugation system covered in the Nepali Grammar guide.

Useful Everyday Adjectives

Weather and Nature Vocabulary

Nepal's geography — from subtropical lowlands to the highest mountains on Earth — makes weather and nature vocabulary genuinely practical rather than just classroom filler. Paani parcha (it is raining), garmi cha (it is hot), and jaado cha (it is cold) are sentence-level phrases you will hear constantly, especially if you are traveling between regions with very different climates within the same week.

Mountain and trekking vocabulary deserves special attention if travel is part of your motivation for learning Nepali: himaal (mountain/Himalaya), pahaad (hill), nadi (river), and baato (path/trail) come up constantly in both everyday conversation and any trekking context, and are worth learning even if your main focus is conversational rather than travel-specific Nepali, since geography shapes so much of daily Nepali life and conversation.

Common Colors

Frequently Asked Questions