fú
prisoner of war
Phonosemantic compound. 亻 represents the meaning and 孚 represents the sound. Originally written as 孚, which depicts a hand (爪) capturing a child (子).
Evolution

Oracle script
(~1250-1000 BC)
Bronze script
Late Western Zhou (~800 BC)
Seal script
Shuowen (~100 AD)Regular script
ModernDefinitions
Most common words with 俘
Freq. | Word | Meaning |
---|---|---|
captive | ||
prisoner of war | ||
to capture (enemy property or personnel) | ||
to take prisoner | ||
to capture enemy personnel (for intelligence purposes) |
Statistics
Not found in HSK word list
Appears in 3.5400% of movies
2411th most common character in movies
2057th most common character in books
Miscellaneous
Strokes | 9 |
Unicode | U+4FD8 |
Shuowen | “俘,軍所獲也。从人,孚聲。” |
Sources
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