gōng
bow
Pictograph of a bow for shooting arrows.
Evolution

Oracle script
(~1250-1000 BC)
Bronze script
Early Western Zhou (~1000 BC)
Seal script
Shuowen (~100 AD)
Clerical script
Eastern Han dynasty (25-220 AD)Regular script
ModernDefinitions
Most common words with 弓
Freq. | Word | Meaning |
---|---|---|
to bend | ||
bow and arrow | ||
catapult | ||
circular segment | ||
lit. a bird startled by the mere twang of a bow (idiom) |
Component uses
Historical pronunciation
Old Chinese | Middle Chinese | Pinyin | Gloss |
*kʷəŋ | kjuwng | gōng | bow (n.) |
Statistics
Not found in HSK word list
Appears in 3.0594% of movies
2573rd most common character in movies
2229th most common character in books
Miscellaneous
Strokes | 3 |
Unicode | U+5F13 |
Shuowen | “弓,以近窮遠。象形。” |
Sources
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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