shī
lose
Original meaning:
leisure; carefree
Depicts a person with their hair loose. Based on the original meaning "leisure; carefree", now written as 佚. The meaning later shifted to "lose" and "fail".
Evolution

Bronze script
Early Western Zhou (~1000 BC)
Seal script
Shuowen (~100 AD)
Clerical script
Eastern Han dynasty (25-220 AD)Regular script
ModernDefinitions
Component uses
Historical pronunciation
Old Chinese | Middle Chinese | Pinyin | Gloss |
*l̥i[t] | syit | shī | lose |
Statistics
HSK level 3
Appears in 92.2794% of movies
279th most common character in movies
375th most common character in books
Miscellaneous
Strokes | 5 |
Unicode | U+5931 |
Shuowen | “失,縱也。从手,乙聲。” |
Sources
何景成《甲骨文字詁林補編》p.26
黃德寬《古文字譜系疏證》p.3349
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