shǐ
begin
Original meaning:
elder sister
Phonosemantic compound. 女 represents the meaning and 台 represents the sound. Based on the original meaning "elder sister", now written as 姒. The meaning later shifted to "first" and "start".
Evolution

Bronze script
Early Western Zhou (~1000 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 |
*l̥əʔ | syiX | shǐ | begin |
Statistics
HSK level 3
Appears in 95.5150% of movies
242nd most common character in movies
381st most common character in books
Miscellaneous
Strokes | 8 |
Unicode | U+59CB |
Shuowen | “始,女之初也。从女,台聲。” |
Sources
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