gù
incident, happening, cause
Phonosemantic compound. 攵 represents the meaning and 古 represents the sound.
Evolution

Bronze script
Early Western Zhou (~1000 BC)
Seal script
Shuowen (~100 AD)
Clerical script
Eastern Han dynasty (25-220 AD)Regular script
ModernDefinitions
gù
ancient, old; reason, because; happening; instance; reason; cause; intentional; former; old; friend; therefore; hence; (of people) to die, dead
Historical pronunciation
Old Chinese | Middle Chinese | Pinyin | Gloss |
*kˤa(ʔ)-s | kuH | gù | fact; reason |
*kˤaʔ-s | kuH | gù | old (not new) |
Statistics
Not found in HSK word list
Appears in 66.2502% of movies
577th most common character in movies
572nd most common character in books
Miscellaneous
Strokes | 9 |
Unicode | U+6545 |
Shuowen | “故,使為之也。从攴,古聲。” |
Sources
李学勤《字源》p.250
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