chí
sustain
Phonosemantic compound. 扌 represents the meaning and 寺 represents the sound.
Evolution

Bronze script
Late Spring and Autumn (~500 BC)
Seal script
Shuowen (~100 AD)
Clerical script
Eastern Han dynasty (25-220 AD)Regular script
ModernDefinitions
chí
sustain, support; hold, grasp; to hold; to grasp; to support; to maintain; to persevere; to manage; to run (i.e. administer); to control
Most common words with 持
Freq. | Word | Meaning |
---|---|---|
to support | ||
to keep | ||
to persevere with | ||
to continue | ||
to keep |
Historical pronunciation
Old Chinese | Middle Chinese | Pinyin | Gloss |
*[d]rə | dri | chí | grasp, hold |
Statistics
Not found in HSK word list
Appears in 81.0187% of movies
405th most common character in movies
357th most common character in books
Miscellaneous
Strokes | 9 |
Unicode | U+6301 |
Shuowen | “持,握也。从手,寺聲。” |
Sources
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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