How to say cheers around the world
13 September 2026
Every list of these is the same list, and at least one line in it is usually wrong. Here is the word country by country, the custom that matters more than the word, and the reason the right word is nearly always smaller than a country.
The short answer
Cheers in Britain, Santé in France, Salute in Italy, Prost in Germany, Proost in the Netherlands, Salud in Spanish, Saúde in Portuguese, Skål across Scandinavia, Kippis in Finland, Sláinte in Ireland, Yamas in Greece, Şerefe in Turkey, Na zdraví in Czechia, Na zdrowie in Poland, Gaumarjos in Georgia, L'chaim in Hebrew, Gānbēi in Mandarin, Kanpai in Japan, Geonbae in Korea, Dô in Vietnam, Chok dee in Thailand. Most of them mean health. The interesting ones are the exceptions, and they are below — along with two countries that have no word at all.
Britain — Cheers, and the two other things it means
Worth starting here, because this is where the word on the front of this piece comes from, and in Britain it long ago stopped being only a toast. Somebody hands you a pint: cheers. Somebody holds a door: cheers. You are leaving the pub: cheers. It is the only word on this list that has drifted that far from the glass. America took the toast and largely left the other two behind, though the email sign-off has been quietly crossing back for years.
Ireland — Sláinte
Health once more, and the one most often mispronounced by people who have only ever read it: SLAWN-cha, not slain-tee.
France — Santé
Health, or à la vôtre for a table and à la tienne for one friend. France has the longest rulebook in Europe: eyes meet and stay met, you do not cross somebody else's arm to reach a glass, you wait until everybody has clinked before the first sip, and you never toast with water. The curse for looking away is the same seven years, and the same impolite version, as in Germany.
Italy — Salute, and cin cin
Salute is health. Cin cin is the sound, and it has a better story than it looks: it came back from Guangzhou with Europeans who had heard qing qing, and the French tchin-tchin arrived by the same route around 1900. It is also the one word here to leave at a border. Do not say cin cin in Japan, where it lands as a word for a small boy's anatomy.
Germany and Austria — Prost
From the Latin prosit, may it be good. You meet the other person's eyes as the glasses touch, and you do it with each person at the table in turn. Missing somebody's eyes is supposed to cost you seven years of bad luck, and the version people actually quote is ruder than that. The origin stories — Vikings watching each other's sword hands, sloshing the drinks together to prove neither was poisoned — are folklore rather than history, and worth telling anyway. Proost across the border in the Netherlands, with the eye contact and rather less ceremony.
Czechia — Na zdraví
To your health, and the most procedural toast in Europe. Eyes meet, you clink with each person individually, and you do not reach across somebody who is mid-clink. You wait for the host or the eldest person to go first. The same seven-year curse applies, in the same impolite form.
Poland — Na zdrowie
The real one, and the source of the mix-up in the next section. It doubles as what you say when somebody sneezes, which is how it travelled so far so confidently.
Russia — the toast that is not a toast
Na zdorovie is not a Russian toast. In Russian it means you're welcome — the thing you say when somebody thanks you for feeding them. The confusion is Polish, and decades of films cast Polish speakers as Russians. What Russians actually do is toast to something rather than shout a word: to love, to those who are not here, to the hosts. Where a single phrase is used, it is vashe zdorovye.
Hungary — and not with beer
Hungary has the most specific rule anywhere. No clinking with beer. The story is that Austrian officers celebrated with beer after the 1848 revolution was put down, and Hungarians swore off it for a hundred and fifty years. The hundred and fifty years ran out in 1999. Plenty of people still keep it, which tells you what these customs are really for.
Georgia — Gaumarjos
May you be victorious, and the deepest toasting culture on earth. A Georgian feast has a tamada, a toastmaster, who runs the table through a sequence of subjects — ancestors, parents, the guest, peace — and nobody drinks while a toast is being made, only after it. The role is not a modern flourish: a bronze figurine of a tamada found in Georgia is older than the Georgian alphabet.
Sweden and the Nordics — Skål
The word is shared across Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Iceland, and the ritual is most elaborate in Sweden: meet the eyes of everyone at the table, drink, then meet them again before the glass goes down. The second look is the part visitors miss. Finland goes its own way with kippis.
Greece — Yamas
Short for to our health, and said to the table rather than person by person — which makes it one of the easier ones to get right as a visitor, since there is no sequence to work through and nobody to leave out.
Turkey — Şerefe
To honor, which is a better wish than health and rarer than you would expect. Said over rakı more often than anything else, and traditionally the first sip waits for the eldest person at the table.
Israel — L'chaim
To life. The only widely used toast on this list that wishes you something larger than good health, which is probably why it is the one that escaped its own language.
China — Gānbēi
Dry the cup, which is less a wish than an instruction, and here it is taken fairly literally. Glass height is hierarchy: clink with your rim below the other person's if they outrank you, and expect them to lower theirs in turn if they are being gracious about it.
Japan — Kanpai
The same two characters as gānbēi, and the same literal meaning, though nobody enforces it. The etiquette outranks the word: you pour for other people and not for yourself, and you wait for every glass to be filled before the first one is raised.
Korea — Geonbae
Same meaning again, with the hierarchy made visible. You receive and pour with two hands, and the younger or more junior person holds their glass lower than the elder's as the two touch. Turning slightly away to drink in front of someone senior is still common.
Vietnam — Một, hai, ba, dô!
One, two, three, in. The whole table counts together and goes at the same moment, which makes it the most democratic toast on this list — nobody leads it and nobody is left holding a glass alone.
Thailand — Chok dee
Good luck rather than good health, and one of the few here that wishes you something the drink cannot deliver on its own.
The Philippines — no word, because the ritual is different
There is no Tagalog word for cheers, and the reason is that the moment it would name does not happen. Filipino drinking runs on the tagay: one glass, filled and passed around the circle by a tanggero who decides how much goes in and who gets it next. Nobody is holding their own drink, so there is no instant when glasses meet and somebody has to say something. The trust is in sharing the glass rather than in raising one.
Spain, Mexico and Latin America — Salud
Health, again, and usually said once for the table rather than person by person. Mexico adds a longer call for a group — arriba, abajo, al centro, adentro — up, down, to the middle, and in.
Portugal and Brazil — Saúde
Health once more. Brazil also says tim-tim, which looks like one more descendant of the same qing qing that gave Italy cin cin and France tchin-tchin — three countries, one borrowed sound, and none of them aware they are quoting Guangzhou.
India — the word that was borrowed
India is the second country here with no word of its own, and the reason is the same shape as the Philippines: the custom of raising a glass to somebody arrived from outside, so no phrase grew up around it. What people say is cheers, in English, everywhere. Formal occasions reach for a constructed line — aapki sehat ke liye, to your health — and Urdu speakers have ba-salaamatii, but neither is what anybody says in a bar. The borrowed word won, and then something more interesting happened to it.
The word is usually smaller than the country
Here is what none of the lists have. A country is the wrong unit. In Bangalore people do not say cheers, they say cheersuu — the same borrowed English word with a Kannada ending on it, the way chips becomes chipsuu and drinks becomes drinksuu. It is in no list of how to say cheers in India, because it is not Indian, it is Bangalorean. Punjabi speakers have maujaaN, good times, which is in no list either. Ask around anywhere and you find the same thing: a city's version, a family's version, the one word a particular group of friends has said to each other for twenty years and never explained to anybody.
Which is the part worth keeping
The reason to know how other people toast is not to get it right in a bar abroad. It is that the word is a small piece of belonging, and the people you would say yours to are usually somewhere else by now. That is what Cheersuu is for, and where its name came from: one photo of what is in your glass and where you are, sent to the person you were thinking of when you picked it up. They open it with no app and no account. If they answer with a drink of their own, both glasses land on the same table.