奧 - Dong Chinese dictionary

ào, aò

mysterious

Phonosemantic compound. 宀 represents the meaning and 𢍏 represents the sound.

Components

宀 Meaning component

mián

roof

𢍏 Sound component

juàn

to roll rice into ball

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

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

Evolution

Seal script

Shuowen (~100 AD)

Seal script

Western Han dynasty (202 BC-9 AD)

Clerical script

Eastern Han dynasty (25-220 AD)

Clerical script

Cao Wei (Three Kingdoms: 222-280 AD)

Regular script

Modern

Definitions

奥 (奧)

ào

mysterious, obscure, profound; obscure; mysterious

奥 (奧)

Aò

Austria; Austrian; abbr. for 奧地利|奥地利[Aòdìlì]; Olympic; Olympics; abbr. for 奧林匹克|奥林匹克[Aòlínpǐkè]

Most common words with 奧

Freq.	Word	Meaning
	奥	Austria
	奥运	Olympic Games
	奥运会	Olympic Games
	奥斯卡	(name) Oscar
	奥迪	Audi

Historical pronunciation

Old Chinese	Middle Chinese	Pinyin	Gloss
*ʔˤuk-s	'awH	ào	southwest corner of a house
*ʔ(r)uk	'juwk	yù	cove in the bank of a stream

Statistics

Not found in HSK word list

Appears in 27.2465% of movies

706th most common character in movies

972nd most common character in books

Miscellaneous

Strokes	13
Simplified	奥
Unicode	U+5967
Shuowen	“奧，宛也。室之西南隅。从宀，聲。”

Sources

MTSU Chinese text computing

漢語多功能字庫

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Meaning