How tall is Krillin?

Krillin's official height: 153 cm (5′0″)

Krillin, Goku's best friend and the strongest Earthling martial artist of his era, is listed at 153 cm (5′0″) and 45 kg (99 lb). Those figures come from Dragon Ball: Super Exciting Guide, an official guidebook published in 2009, as cited on the Dragon Ball Wiki. The site uses 153 cm as his headline height.

Krillin's shortness is one of the most recognizable things about him, along with his shaved head and missing nose. He's short by real-world standards, short among the Z Fighters, and much shorter than the aliens and androids he spends his career fighting. That contrast is central to his role in the story.

Why Krillin was created short

According to Wikipedia's account of Krillin's creation, Akira Toriyama introduced him along with the World Martial Arts Tournament to add depth to the story, after his editor Kazuhiko Torishima felt that Goku was too plain a protagonist. Torishima wanted someone petty and mischievous to contrast with Goku, and Krillin was the result.

His design emphasizes that contrast. Krillin debuts at 13 as a monk from Orin Temple with a shaved head, no visible nose and six moxibustion burn marks on his forehead, a reference to the practice of Shaolin monks. Toriyama joked that Krillin's lack of a nose was a physical idiosyncrasy that lets him breathe through his skin. Small, bald and noseless, Krillin is designed to look ordinary next to the hero, and his shortness is part of that.

Krillin first appears in chapter 25 of the manga, published in Weekly Shōnen Jump in May 1985, arriving at Master Roshi's island to become his student. He and Goku start as rivals, and after training together they become best friends.

Krillin versus Goku and the Z Fighters

The site's Dragon Ball data, drawn largely from the same official guidebooks, shows just how short Krillin is among his allies:

Of the adult human-sized fighters, only Chiaotzu is shorter than Krillin. Every other member of the Z Fighters stands at least 11 cm above him.

A few comparisons are worth highlighting:

• Goku, 22 cm taller. The two were roughly the same size as boys, when they trained together under Roshi. Goku grew into a 175 cm adult; Krillin stayed at 153. By the Saiyan arc, Krillin's head reaches about Goku's chin.
• Vegeta, 11 cm taller. Vegeta is famously short for a Saiyan prince at 164 cm, and his spiky hair adds a lot of apparent height. Krillin is shorter still.
• Master Roshi, 12 cm taller. Krillin's teacher is listed at 165 cm and 44 kg, almost the same weight as Krillin. The two have nearly identical builds on paper, though Roshi has 12 cm of height on his student.
• Piccolo, 73 cm taller. The 226 cm Namekian is nearly one and a half times Krillin's height, which makes their scenes together, like the Tri-Form attack against Nappa, a study in contrast.

Krillin and Android 18

Krillin's marriage to Android 18 is one of the series' most famous couples, and their height difference is part of the joke. After 18 kisses him on the cheek during the Android arc, Krillin becomes infatuated with her, and by the Buu arc they're married with a daughter, Marron.

Android 18 is consistently drawn taller than Krillin, and the series leans into it in comedic scenes. The site doesn't hold an official height for her, so we can't give an exact figure, but the visual difference is clear in every scene where they stand together. A wife who's noticeably taller than her husband is unusual in real life, which is part of why the pairing is memorable. Research on real couples, such as Stulp and colleagues' 2013 study of British couples, has found that pairs where the man is shorter occur less often than chance would predict, though the effect is modest.

Krillin's height through the series

Dragon Ball covers more than 40 years of in-universe time, and Krillin appears in almost all of it. Here are the main eras, with what's known about his size:

Two of these are worth expanding.

During the Buu arc, Krillin famously lets his hair grow out, and Wikipedia notes that in Resurrection 'F' Android 18 shaves his head again; he goes bald once more in Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero. Hair adds a centimeter or two of apparent height, so the haired Krillin looks very slightly taller, but his listed height doesn't change.

In Dragon Ball Daima (2024), many characters are turned into small, child-like versions of themselves. Wikipedia notes that Krillin's mini version was voiced by Aki Kanada, the only time someone other than Mayumi Tanaka has voiced him in Japanese. For that series, Krillin's already small 153 cm frame shrinks even further, temporarily.

Short but strong: the strongest Earthling

Krillin's height often gets him dismissed as the weak member of the team, and the series does use him for comic relief. But he's also, consistently, the strongest pure Earthling in the main cast through much of Dragon Ball Z. His voice actress, Mayumi Tanaka, has said that when younger fans called Krillin weak, she'd point out that he and Yamcha were the strongest Earthlings, while the others were aliens.

His techniques make size irrelevant. The Kienzan (Destructo Disc), his signature move, is a spinning disc of energy capable of slicing through opponents far stronger than he is, including Frieza's tail. He also masters the Kamehameha and the Solar Flare, the latter learned from Tien. None of these rely on reach or body mass, which is the same design logic that lets a 153 cm fighter stand alongside Saiyans.

Krillin also dies more than any other main character. The Dragon Ball Wiki lists several death dates, including his killing by Tambourine in Age 753 and by Frieza on Namek in Age 762, the death that triggers Goku's first Super Saiyan transformation. His vulnerability as an ordinary human is part of why those moments land.

Krillin's family and later life

After the Cell Games, Krillin settles down. By the start of the Buu arc, seven years later, he has stepped back from fighting, married Android 18 and become father to their daughter Marron. Wikipedia's summary notes that when Goku asks how this is possible, Krillin explains that 18 is a cyborg, still human at heart, and able to have children.

In Dragon Ball Z: Resurrection 'F', he's working as a police officer, and he returns to combat when Frieza comes back. In Dragon Ball Super he helps recruit Piccolo and Majin Buu for the Tournament of Power, takes part in a baseball game between Universes 6 and 7, and trains with Goku again. Through all of this his listed height stays at 153 cm; Dragon Ball's adults don't change size once grown, except for transformations.

Marron gives the family height comparisons a third point, but no official height for her appears in the site's data, so she's left out of the tables here.

Dragon Ball GT and other versions

In the non-manga sequel Dragon Ball GT, Krillin appears with a mustache, wearing a cardigan, shirt and tie, and Wikipedia notes he is killed by Android 17 after helping free Android 18 from 17's influence. He's later revived by Shenron. GT doesn't publish a different height for him.

Krillin also turns up across the franchise's films and games. He appears in twelve of the thirteen original Dragon Ball Z films, and in two of the three original Dragon Ball films. In the crossover manga Cross Epoch, he runs a train with One Piece's Tony Tony Chopper, a pairing of two characters who are both, in their own series, among the shortest of the main cast. Chopper is listed on this site at 90 cm in his normal form, so even Krillin towers over him.

Voice and popularity

Krillin has been voiced in Japanese by Mayumi Tanaka in almost every production since the 1980s. Toriyama chose her after hearing her as Giovanni in the anime film Night on the Galactic Railroad, according to Wikipedia. Tanaka is also the voice of One Piece's Monkey D. Luffy, which links Krillin to another character on this site who is short by his own series' standards. In English, Terry Klassen voiced him in the Ocean dub, and the long-running Funimation dub cast Sonny Strait.

He's also been consistently popular. Wikipedia records that Japanese fans voted him the seventh most popular Dragon Ball character in 2004, and that a 2007 Oricon poll of characters fans wanted to see in their own spin-offs ranked him third among male characters. For a character defined partly by being small and frequently overpowered, that's a strong showing, and it says a lot about how well Toriyama made Krillin's ordinary stature work in his favor.

What 153 cm means in the real world

Dragon Ball's world is fictional, but it's created in Japan and full of Japanese cultural references, so Japanese averages make the natural comparison. The NCD Risk Factor Collaboration's estimates on this site's Japan average height page put Japanese men born in 1956, close to when Toriyama's generation grew up, at an average of about 169.3 cm, and those born in 1996 at about 170.8 cm (5′7″). Krillin's 153 cm is roughly 16 to 18 cm below average for a Japanese man of either generation.

At 153 cm he'd be closer to the average Japanese woman of his generation, about 158 cm, than to the average man. The site's 5′0″ page shows how uncommon that height is for adult men. It's a deliberate choice by Toriyama: Krillin is meant to look like an ordinary, even underestimated person, which makes his courage in fights against world-ending enemies all the more striking.

Krillin's height at a glance

• Official height: 153 cm (5′0″), Dragon Ball: Super Exciting Guide (2009)
• Official weight: 45 kg (99 lb)
• Versus Goku: 22 cm shorter
• Versus Vegeta: 11 cm shorter
• Shorter Z Fighter: only Chiaotzu (138 cm)
• Versus Japanese men born in 1996: about 18 cm below average

To put Krillin next to any other character or real person, try the height comparison tool.