博 - Dong Chinese dictionary

bó

plentiful, gamble

Original meaning:

fight

Phonosemantic compound. 盾 represents the meaning and 尃 represents the sound. Based on the original meaning "fight", which later shifted to "win", "plentiful", and "gamble".

Components

盾 Meaning component

dùn

shield

Depicts a shield. Modern form looks like 十.

盾 hints at the original meaning of 博, "fight", which is no longer the most common meaning of 博 in modern Mandarin.

Due to historical stylistic changes, this component is less similar to 盾 than it was in ancient scripts.

尃 Sound component

fū

state, announce

博 and 尃 don't sound similar in modern Mandarin due to historical phonetic changes. They were more similar in older Chinese.

Evolution

Bronze script

Mid Western Zhou (~900 BC)

Seal script

Shuowen (~100 AD)

Clerical script

Eastern Han dynasty (25-220 AD)

Regular script

Modern

Definitions

博

bó

gamble, play games; wide, broad; extensive; ample; rich; obtain; aim; to win; to get; plentiful; to gamble

博 (愽)

bó

old variant of 博[bó]

Most common words with 博

Freq.	Word	Meaning
	博	ample
	博士	doctor
	博物馆	museum
	赌博	to gamble
	博文	blog article

Historical pronunciation

Old Chinese	Middle Chinese	Pinyin	Gloss
*pˤak	pak	bó	broad

Statistics

HSK level 5

Appears in 33.1571% of movies

686th most common character in movies

965th most common character in books

Miscellaneous

Strokes	12
Unicode	U+535A
Shuowen	“博，大，通也。从十，从尃。尃，布也。”

Sources

MTSU Chinese text computing

漢語多功能字庫

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Original meaning:

Freq.

Word

Meaning