憂 - Dong Chinese dictionary

yōu

sad

Phonosemantic compound. 心 represents the meaning and 夔 represents the sound.

Components

kuí

one-legged monster

憂 and 夔 don't sound similar in modern Mandarin due to historical phonetic changes. They were more similar in older Chinese.憂 /*ʔ(r)u/
夔 /*ɡrul/

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

心 Meaning component

xīn

heart

Evolution

Bronze script

Early Western Zhou (~1000 BC)

Seal script

Shuowen (~100 AD)

Clerical script

Eastern Han dynasty (25-220 AD)

Regular script

Modern

Definitions

忧 (憂)

yōu

sad, grieved; grief, melancholy; to worry; to concern oneself with; worried; anxiety; sorrow; (literary) to observe mourning

Most common words with 憂

Freq.	Word	Meaning
	担忧	to worry
	忧郁	sullen
	忧伤	distressed
	忧	to worry
	忧虑	to worry

Component uses

Sound component in 3 characters (2 verified)

優擾懮

Historical pronunciation

Old Chinese	Middle Chinese	Pinyin	Gloss
*ʔ(r)u	'juw	yōu	grief, grieved

Statistics

Not found in HSK word list

Appears in 12.4780% of movies

1910th most common character in movies

1461st most common character in books

Miscellaneous

Strokes	15
Simplified	忧
Unicode	U+6182
Shuowen	“憂，和之行也。从夊，聲。《詩》曰：‘布政憂憂。’”

Sources

MTSU Chinese text computing

季旭昇《說文新證》p.793-794

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Word

Meaning