Word.ws English Dictionary

suanpan

suanpan noun: a Chinese abacus with two beads on each rod in the upper deck and five beads on each rod in the bottom deck.

Noun

suanpan (plural suanpans)

  1. A Chinese abacus with two beads on each rod in the upper deck and five beads on each rod in the bottom deck.
    • The number of rods in the traditional suanpan is usually odd, and never less than nine.2014, Yoshihide Igarashi, Tom Altman, Mariko Funada, Barbara Kamiyama, Computing: A Historical and Technical Perspective, page 64
    • Humboldt defended the idea that the Chinese suanpan (our abacus) might be at the origin of our number system.2016, Volker R. Remmert, Martina R. Schneider, Henrik Kragh Sørensen, editors, Historiography of Mathematics in the 19th and 20th Centuries, page 19

Forms of suanpan

pluralsuanpans
alternative formschwanpan
alternative formsouanpan
alternative formsuan-pan
alternative formswanpan
alternative formswan-pan

Origin of suanpan

From Mandarin 算盤／算盘 (suànpán).

Questions about suanpan

What does suanpan mean?
Suanpan means a Chinese abacus with two beads on each rod in the upper deck and five beads on each rod in the bottom deck.
What part of speech is suanpan?
Suanpan is a noun.
What is the plural of suanpan?
The plural of suanpan is suanpans.

Words near suanpan in the dictionary

  1. Sualocin
  2. suan-pan
  3. suan-pans
  4. Suanen
  5. suanite
  6. suanpan
  7. suanpans
  8. suant
  9. Suao
  10. Suares
  11. Suareses

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: suanpan (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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