In Singapore, you buy vegetables at the 巴刹 (bāshā, the market), live in a 组屋 (an HDB flat) and wear a 大衣 to a wedding — where 大衣 means a suit jacket, not the overcoat it means in Beijing. These are not slang. They are the everyday standard vocabulary of Chinese as it is spoken and written in Singapore and Malaysia, and Singapore's government now records them in a database of its own.
This guide sets out a selection of these words and where each came from, explains the few that mean something different elsewhere, and looks at the evidence for words travelling the other way. To see mainland text rewritten with local terms, try our Singapore and Malaysia Mandarin converter.
Where the records are
The Promote Mandarin Council's Singaporean Mandarin Database (新加坡华语资料库) went online in 2019. Its print edition, announced by the National Institute of Education in March 2025, documents 1,131 terms; the online version listed 754 when we counted in September 2026. Each entry gives a meaning, an origin and, where there is one, the word used elsewhere.
Malaysia has its own reference, the Dictionary of Malaysian Chinese Vocabulary (马来西亚华语特有词语词典), first published in 2022 with 2,182 entries. Both countries' words also appear in the Global Chinese Dictionary (全球华语大词典, 2016), which marks each term with the places it is used.
The words below are taken from Singapore's database. Many are also used in Malaysia, but we have not checked each one against the Malaysian dictionary, so we mark them only as Singaporean.
Five layers of origin
The vocabulary records the history of the region, reflecting the languages Chinese speakers lived alongside, the Chinese varieties their families brought, and the institutions of a modern city.
| Word | Meaning | Used elsewhere | Came from |
|---|---|---|---|
| 巴刹 | market | 菜市场 | Malay pasar, itself from Persian |
| 甘榜 | village | — | Malay kampung |
| 惹兰 | road | — | Malay jalan |
| 红毛丹 | rambutan | 韶子 | Malay rambutan, by sound and meaning |
| 乌达 | otah | — | Malay otak-otak |
| 五脚基 | covered walkway, five-foot way | 骑楼 | Hokkien, a translation of Malay kaki lima |
| 吃蛇 | to skive off | — | Hokkien and Teochew |
| 阿窿 | loan shark | 高利贷 | Cantonese 大耳窿 |
| 饮胜 | cheers (a toast) | — | Cantonese |
| 德士 | taxi | 出租车 | English taxi |
| 罗厘 | lorry | 卡车 | English lorry |
| 固打 | quota | 配额 | English quota |
| 快熟面 | instant noodles | 方便面 | translated from English |
| 组屋 | HDB flat | — | local coinage |
| 乐龄 | senior citizen | 老年人 | local coinage |
| 拥车证 | certificate of entitlement (to own a car) | — | local coinage, 1990 |
| 冷气 | air-conditioning | 空调 | local usage |
| 咖啡乌 | black coffee (kopi-o) | 黑咖啡 | Malay kopi with Hokkien 乌, "black" |
A dash means the database gives no term from elsewhere. This can be because the thing itself is local, like a car-ownership certificate, or because the local word is the only one in common use.
As in any language, register matters for some of these. 吃蛇 and 阿窿 are informal. The database also records 马打, from Malay mata-mata, for the police; it is colloquial, a word to recognise rather than to use in anything formal.
Words that mean something else elsewhere
A few words exist in both places but with different meanings. These are the ones that cause real confusion.
大衣. In Singapore, a man's Western-style suit jacket, or a suit in general. On the mainland, an overcoat. The database traces the Singapore sense to the Hokkien word tua-i.
鸡婆. In Singapore, a busybody — from Hokkien kay poh. In some other varieties of Chinese the word has a vulgar sense, so it is best kept to people who share the Singapore meaning.
Words that cross over
When the Malaysian dictionary was revised, its editors checked every entry against the seventh edition of the mainland's standard dictionary, the Modern Chinese Dictionary (现代汉语词典), and removed 84 words because the mainland dictionary already listed them. Words the first edition had treated as Malaysian were, by then, standard entries in Beijing's reference dictionary too, though whether they originally started in Southeast Asia or were shared all along is another question. The revised edition, with 152 new entries added, holds 2,250.
We could not obtain the list of the 84, so we cannot say which words they were.
A note on our converter
Our converter swaps mainland words for local ones, and until 21 September 2026 some of its rules were too broad. Because it replaced any matching text, 广州 came out as 广州属, 股票市场 as 股票巴刹, and 公寓 — a private flat — as 组屋, which is an HDB flat and a different thing. Those rules have been removed or narrowed, and the percentage word 巴仙 now goes after the number, as in 五十巴仙, rather than before it.
Sources for these words
Meanings, other-region terms and origins are from the entries of the Promote Mandarin Council's Singaporean Mandarin Database, read in September 2026. The print edition's size and date are from the National Institute of Education's announcement. The Malaysian dictionary's figures, including the 84 entries removed, are from a report on its revised edition. Where the database gives two theories of a word's origin, as it does for 沙爹 (satay), we have left the word out rather than choose one.
