mèng
dream
Depicts a person with an emphasized eye (𦰋) sleeping on a bed (爿), conveying the meaning "dream". 𦰋 also represents the sound. The 爿 (bed) component was later reanalyzed as meaning component 夕 (evening).
Components
Evolution

Oracle script
(~1250-1000 BC)
Bronze script
Mid Western Zhou (~900 BC)
Seal script
Shuowen (~100 AD)
Clerical script
Western Jin dynasty (266-316 AD)Regular script
ModernHistorical pronunciation
Old Chinese | Middle Chinese | Pinyin | Gloss |
*C.məŋ-s | mjuwngH | mèng | dream |
Statistics
Not found in HSK word list
Appears in 54.9896% of movies
600th most common character in movies
865th most common character in books
Miscellaneous
Strokes | 13 |
Simplified | |
Unicode | U+5922 |
Shuowen | “夢,不明也。从夕,瞢省聲。” |
Sources
季旭昇《說文新證》p.608-609
劉志基《中國漢字文物大系》Vol. 7, p.558
林志強《《文源》評注》p.229-230
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

