In Shanghainese, as a suffix of a title, "三" is mostly used with a bad sense.

In Shanghai dialect, the word for pauper is realized as [phieʔsε]. Interestingly, this word is known all over the country because of the nation’s fascination with life in the metropolis of Shanghai as vividly described in fiction and movies produced after the 1920s in Shanghai. However, Beijing dialect does not have syllables ending with a stop sound like [ʔ] or a syllable with a mid vowel like [ε] following a sibilant [s]. These sounds, or combinations of them, which do not exist in Beijing dialect, are then replaced in the standard pronunciation by allowable sounds, or combinations of them, in Beijing dialect for such words. Therefore, in putonghua, the Shanghainese word for pauper is realized as bie1san1 as is indicated in the authoritative Xiandai hanyu cidian. (from Chinese: A Linguistic Introduction by Chaofen Sun)