MicroRNA-183 (miR-183) has been shown to play a potential oncogenic role in colon cancer. The aim of this study was to evaluate the expression of miR-183 in colorectal cancer (CRC) and its potential relevance to clinicopathological characteristics and patient survival. Surgical specimens of cancer tissue and adjacent normal mucosa were obtained from 94 patients with CRC. The relative expression levels of miR-183 in the cancer and the normal adjacent mucosa were measured by quantitative real-time PCR. We analyzed their correlation with clinicopathological parameters and prognostic value. The relative expression levels of miR-183 were significantly higher in CRC tissues than in the normal adjacent mucosa (P<0.001), and a high expression of miR-183 correlated with advanced clinical stage (P=0.030), lymph node metastasis (P=0.012), and distant metastasis (P=0.049). Kaplan-Meier analysis indicated that patients with high miR-183 expression had a poor overall survival (P=0.002). Moreover, multivariate analysis showed that increased expression of miR-183 was an independent predictor of overall survival. The increased expression of miR-183 is closely related to advanced clinical stage, lymph node and distant metastases, and poor prognosis of CRC, indicating that miR-183 may serve as a predictive biomarker for the prognosis or the aggressiveness of CRC.