yán
strict
Phonosemantic compound. 喦 represents the meaning and 敢 represents the sound. Based on the original meaning "exaggerate". The meaning later shifted to "extreme", "severe", and "strict".
Evolution

Bronze script
Late Western Zhou (~800 BC)
Seal script
Shuowen (~100 AD)
Clerical script
Eastern Han dynasty (25-220 AD)Regular script
ModernDefinitions
Historical pronunciation
Old Chinese | Middle Chinese | Pinyin | Gloss |
*ŋ(r)am | ngjaem | yán | stern, majestic |
Statistics
Not found in HSK word list
Appears in 55.2619% of movies
855th most common character in movies
545th most common character in books
Miscellaneous
Strokes | 19 |
Simplified | |
Unicode | U+56B4 |
Shuowen | “嚴,教命急也。从吅,聲。,古文。” |
Sources
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