HSK 5 vocabulary
The 1098 words at HSK 5 (HSK 3.0), with hanzi, tone-colored pinyin and English meaning. The HSK 2.0 tag appears alongside when the word was also in it.
What HSK 5 is
This page lists 1,098 entries for HSK 5, covering 1,062 distinct hanzi — the two figures differ because a word with more than one reading gets one entry per reading. Of those entries, 650 also carry an HSK 2.0 tag (in HSK 2.0 terms: 9 at level 3, 71 at level 4, 223 at level 5 and 347 at level 6), and the rest have no 2.0 tag at all. They are all new words relative to HSK 4, which has 1,018 entries of its own, and they bring the running total from HSK 1 to 4,422. The official HSK 3.0 standard (《国际中文教育中文水平等级标准》, GF 0025-2021) counts 1,071 words at this level and 1,500 characters cumulatively up to it; our list runs higher, mostly because entries are split by reading.
- Entries on this page
- 1,098
- Distinct hanzi
- 1,062
- With an HSK 2.0 tag
- 650
- Running total from HSK 1
- 4,422
- Official standard · words at this level
- 1,071
- Official standard · characters up to here
- 1,500
What changes here
HSK 5 leans toward written and formal Chinese: press, essays, workplace language, and four-character set phrases. The vocabulary is less about new topics and more about a second, more formal way to say something you can already express, so the work shifts to register — knowing which of two words belongs in a news article and which in a chat.
How to study it, and how long it takes
The arithmetic is honest and fixed: at 10 new words a day, the 1,098 entries at HSK 5 take about 110 days — roughly 16 weeks; at 20 a day, about 55 days — roughly 8 weeks. That only counts meeting each word once — what decides whether it stays is the reviews stacked on top, which is why the pace people actually sustain matters more than the pace they plan.
Wanyu handles that part with spaced repetition (FSRS), so each word comes back on the day you are about to forget it rather than on a fixed calendar. Every word sits inside an example sentence and has audio, on the word and on the sentence, so a new entry gets heard and used instead of only read. The app is free — no subscription, no accounts, no ads, no cloud — and for now it runs on iPhone only.
More numbers: how many words are in each HSK level. A worked routine: how to study HSK 4. Why the two standards differ: HSK 3.0 vs HSK 2.0.
Every word with its hanzi, pinyin and meaning (the glosses start from CC-CEDICT and are reviewed for Wanyu). The audio and example sentences for each one are inside the app, free.
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Frequently asked questions
How many words are in HSK 5?
This page lists 1,098 entries for HSK 5 (1,062 distinct hanzi: a word with two readings gets one entry per reading). The official HSK 3.0 standard counts 1,071 words at this level, and 1,500 characters cumulatively up to it.
Is HSK 5 (HSK 3.0) the same as HSK 5 (HSK 2.0)?
No. HSK 3.0 and HSK 2.0 are different standards, and the same number does not mark the same bar. That is why this list shows both tags: 650 of the 1,098 entries here also appeared somewhere in HSK 2.0 (spread across 2.0 levels 3 to 6), and the rest have no 2.0 tag at all.
How long does HSK 5 take?
That depends on your time and your starting point, but the arithmetic is fixed: at 10 new words a day, the 1,098 entries take about 110 days — roughly 16 weeks; at 20 a day, about 55 days — roughly 8 weeks. Reviews on top of that are what decide whether the words stay.