Dong Chinese dictionary

fān, pān

to take turns

Original meaning:

animal's paw

Depicts an animal's claw (釆) with their paw shown. 釆 also represents the sound. Based on the original meaning "animal's paw", now written as 蹯. The current meaning is a phonetic loan.

Components

釆 Sound Iconic component

biàn

distinguish

Used here to depict an animal's claw.

◎ Iconic component

characterless component

Depicts an animal's paw. Modern form looks like unrelated 田.

Evolution

Bronze script

Late Western Zhou (~800 BC)

Seal script

Shuowen (~100 AD)

Clerical script

Eastern Han dynasty (25-220 AD)

Regular script

Modern

Definitions

番

fān

to take turns; a turn, a time; to repeat; foreign (non-Chinese); barbarian; classifier for occurrences (of an event, action or speech utterance); classifier for iterations: times, -fold (as in twofold etc); classifier for situations: kind, sort

番

Pān

surname Pan

Most common words with 番