wéi, wěi
only
Phonosemantic compound. 口 represents the meaning and 隹 represents the sound.
Evolution

Bronze script
Early Western Zhou (~1000 BC)
Oracle script
(~1250-1000 BC)
Seal script
Shuowen (~100 AD)
Clerical script
Eastern Han dynasty (25-220 AD)Regular script
ModernDefinitions
Most common words with 唯
Freq. | Word | Meaning |
---|---|---|
-ism | ||
only | ||
materialism, philosophical doctrine that physical matter is the whole of reality | ||
philosophy of idealism, the doctrine that external reality is a product of consciousness | ||
dialectical materialism |
Component uses
Sound component in 1 character (1 verified)
Simplified component in 1 character (1 verified)
Historical pronunciation
Old Chinese | Middle Chinese | Pinyin | Gloss |
*ɢʷij (< *ɢʷuj?) | ywij | wéi | only |
Statistics
Not found in HSK word list
Appears in 68.5888% of movies
663rd most common character in movies
1094th most common character in books
Miscellaneous
Strokes | 11 |
Unicode | U+552F |
Shuowen | “唯,諾也。从口,隹聲。” |
Sources
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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