zǐ
elder sister
Phonosemantic compound. 女 represents the meaning and 𠂔 represents the sound.
Evolution

Bronze script
Late Western Zhou (~800 BC)
Seal script
Shuowen (~100 AD)
Clerical script
Eastern Han dynasty (25-220 AD)Regular script
ModernMost common words with 姊
Freq. | Word | Meaning |
---|---|---|
older sister | ||
(older and younger) sisters | ||
my sister | ||
father's sister's daughters | ||
paternal female cousin |
Historical pronunciation
Old Chinese | Middle Chinese | Pinyin | Gloss |
*[ts][i]jʔ | tsijX | zǐ | older sister |
Statistics
Not found in HSK word list
Appears in 0.9290% of movies
3078th most common character in movies
2236th most common character in books
Miscellaneous
Strokes | 7 |
Unicode | U+59CA |
Shuowen | “姊,女兄也。从女,聲。” |
Sources
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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