哪里
nǎ lǐ
In real, traceable use. Part of the curated seed collection; community review is coming.
Traditional: 哪裡
Where — the question word for places. It stays where the answer goes: 你去哪里? 'where are you going?', 你家在哪里? 'where is your home?'. In northern China people often say 哪儿 nǎr instead. Doubled, as 哪里哪里, it politely brushes off a compliment. Compare 这里 'here' and 那里 'there'.
Đại từ nghi vấn hỏi nơi chốn: đâu, ở đâu, chỗ nào. Đứng đúng chỗ của câu trả lời: 你去哪里? (bạn đi đâu?), 你家在哪里? (nhà bạn ở đâu?). Người miền Bắc Trung Quốc hay nói 哪儿 nǎr. Nói lặp lại, 哪里哪里 là lời đáp khiêm tốn khi được khen, giống “đâu có, đâu có”.
PronounRegister: neutral
Examples
Editorial example (illustrative, not a corpus attestation) — awaiting a native-speaker check
Sources & notes
Hán-Việt bridge batch 063 (2026-11-14). Headword, Traditional form and pinyin checked against CC-CEDICT (CC BY-SA 4.0) source ↗ · Hán-Việt reading: Unihan kVietnamese source ↗ ; en.wiktionary Vietnamese entries via kaikki.org extract, snapshot 2026-07-31 (CC BY-SA 4.0): Hán-Việt reading 里/裡 = lí · No Vietnamese entry is linked as its twin; the Hán-Việt reading is given character by character. Definition, literal gloss and example sentence are original; the example has not had a native-speaker check yet.
Common questions
What does “哪里” mean?
Where — the question word for places. It stays where the answer goes: 你去哪里? 'where are you going?', 你家在哪里? 'where is your home?'. In northern China people often say 哪儿 nǎr instead. Doubled, as 哪里哪里, it politely brushes off a compliment. Compare 这里 'here' and 那里 'there'. Literally: which place
Is “哪里” formal or informal?
哪里 is generally neutral.