míng
dark
Original meaning:
to give birth to a child
Depicts two hands (𠬜) opening a woman's legs with a baby's head protruding out of it. Based on the original meaning "to give birth to a child", now written as 娩. The current meaning is a phonetic loan.
Components
Evolution

Seal script
Shuowen (~100 AD)
Clerical script
Eastern Han dynasty (25-220 AD)Regular script
ModernDefinitions
Most common words with 冥
Freq. | Word | Meaning |
---|---|---|
dark | ||
Pluto (dwarf planet) | ||
to meditate | ||
in the unseen world of spirits | ||
dark |
Component uses
Historical pronunciation
Old Chinese | Middle Chinese | Pinyin | Gloss |
*mˤeŋ | meng | míng | dark |
Statistics
Not found in HSK word list
Appears in 3.4599% of movies
2407th most common character in movies
2739th most common character in books
Miscellaneous
Strokes | 10 |
Unicode | U+51A5 |
Shuowen | “冥,幽也。从日,从六,冖聲。日數十,十六日而月始虧,幽也。” |
Sources
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