How to say it in Chinese

Cough in Chinese

to cough · HSK 4

咳 ké

他轻轻地咳了几声。 He coughed softly a few times.

Hear 咳 and see more sentences

Other ways to say cough

How do you say cough in Chinese?

Cough in Chinese is 咳 (ké). You can also say 咳嗽 (ké sou).

Which word should I use?

Start with the first one: it is the easiest on the HSK list. The others say it too, often in a more formal way or for a narrower sense; each one’s page has real sentences that show how it is used.

Where do these words come from?

The CC-CEDICT dictionary’s meanings for the official HSK word list. A word is shown for an English word when that is one of its first meanings; the easiest word whose first meaning it is comes first.

More free tools

Greetings: hello, good morning and goodbye. Measure words: the classifier for any noun. Tone practice: say a word and see your tones. Read any Mandarin: point at a word for its meaning.

Meanings from CC-CEDICT (CC BY-SA 4.0). Chinese often has more than one way to say a word.