谁
shéi
In real, traceable use. Part of the curated seed collection; community review is coming.
Traditional: 誰
Who, whom — the question word for people. Like every Chinese question word it stays where the answer goes: 他是谁? 'who is he?', 谁是老师? 'who is the teacher?'. 谁的 is 'whose'. You will usually hear shéi; shuí is an equally correct, more bookish pronunciation.
Đại từ nghi vấn chỉ người: ai. Đứng đúng chỗ của câu trả lời, như tiếng Việt: 他是谁? (anh ấy là ai?), 谁是老师? (ai là giáo viên?). 谁的 là “của ai”. Thường đọc là shéi; cách đọc shuí cũng đúng, nghe trang trọng, sách vở hơn.
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 ↗ · 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 “谁” mean?
Who, whom — the question word for people. Like every Chinese question word it stays where the answer goes: 他是谁? 'who is he?', 谁是老师? 'who is the teacher?'. 谁的 is 'whose'. You will usually hear shéi; shuí is an equally correct, more bookish pronunciation.
Is “谁” formal or informal?
谁 is generally neutral.