dīng
cubes
Original meaning:
city wall
In ancient scripts 丁 was written in two different ways: (1) depicting the walls of a city, which is now written as 圍, or (2) depicting a nail, which is now written as 釘.
Evolution

Oracle script
(~1250-1000 BC)
Bronze script
Early Western Zhou (~1000 BC)
Seal script
Shuowen (~100 AD)
Clerical script
Eastern Han dynasty (25-220 AD)Regular script
ModernDefinitions
Most common words with 丁
Freq. | Word | Meaning |
---|---|---|
butyl | ||
Martin (name) | ||
Latin | ||
pudding (loanword) | ||
Latin America |
Component uses
Meaning component in 1 character (0 verified)
Historical pronunciation
Old Chinese | Middle Chinese | Pinyin | Gloss |
*tˤeŋ | teng | dīng | 4th heavenly stem |
*tˤeŋ | teng | dīng | nail (n.) |
*tˤreŋ | treang | zhēng | sound of beating |
Statistics
Not found in HSK word list
Appears in 22.2489% of movies
1152nd most common character in movies
1168th most common character in books
Miscellaneous
Strokes | 2 |
Unicode | U+4E01 |
Shuowen | “丁,夏時萬物皆丁實。象形。丁承丙,象人心。” |
Sources
季旭昇《說文新證》p. 962
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