A detailed experimental study on the flow characteristics of various vortex shedding regimes was carried out for the flow of non-Newtonian fluids around a cylinder. The fluids were aqueous solutions of carboxymethyl cellulose (CMC) and tylose at weight concentrations ranging from 0.1 to 0.6%, which had varying degrees of shear-thinning and elasticity. Two cylinders of 10 and 20 mm diameter were used in the experiments, defining an aspect ratio of 12 and 6 and producing blockages of 5 and 10%, respectively. The Reynolds number (Re) ranged from 50 to 9 x 10(3). Shear-thinning gave rise to a decrease of the cylinder boundary-layer thickness and to a reduction of the diffusion length (l(d)), which raised the Strouhal number, St. In the laminar shedding regime, a modified Strouhal number was successful at overlapping the shedding frequency variation with the Reynolds number for the various solutions. In contrast, fluid elasticity was found to increase the formation length (l(f)), and this contributed to a decrease of the Strouhal number. The overall effect of shear-thinning and elasticity was an increase in the Strouhal number. The increase in polymer concentration and the corresponding increase in fluid elasticity were responsible for the reduction of the critical Reynolds number marking the sudden decrease of the formation length, Re-lf. In the shear layer transition regime, the formation length and Strouhal number data collapsed onto single curves as function of a Reynolds number difference, which confirmed Coelho and Pinho (J. Non-Newtonian Fluid Mech. (2003), accepted for publication) finding that an important effect of fluid rheology was in changing the demarcations of the various flow regimes. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.