In the late 19th century, with the rapid rise of Singapore driven by international trade,   various Chinese varieties such as Minnan dialect and Cantonese brought by Chinese immigrants came into sustained contact with the booming commercial activities and jointly created a diverse range of overseas Huayu commercial vocabulary. This interaction gave rise to a rich and distinctive body of commercial vocabulary, which constitutes a substantial component of the early Nanyang Huayu lexicon. Drawing on commercial expressions collected from Chinese-language newspapers of that period, including the Lat Pau and the Sing Po, this paper classifies these expressions into three broad categories: goods and trademarks, business operations and transactions, and currency and commercial instruments. Through selected examples, it illustrates the translingual and cross-cultural lexical innovations of Chinese dialects used by early Nanyang Huayu communities in their interaction with local commercial practices. Minnan dialect and Cantonese functioned not only as major sources of commercial vocabulary, but also as a medium for translating and borrowing words from English and local languages. The commercial lexicon demonstrates the linguistic and cultural significance of early Nanyang Huayu: (1) From the perspective of Global Chinese, Nanyang Huayu documents provide valuable evidence for reconstructing the history of modern and contemporary Chinese; (2) these documents shed light on the historical development of Chinese dialects as they travelled with migrant communities and evolved through contact with other languages; and (3) these linguistic developments demonstrate the self-awareness and reflective reference of overseas Chinese in the process of mutual learning from and interacting with other civilizations.