zhǎn
chop
Phonosemantic compound. 車 represents the sound and 斤 represents the meaning.
Evolution

Bronze script
Mid Western Zhou (~900 BC)
Seal script
Shuowen (~100 AD)
Clerical script
Cao Wei (Three Kingdoms: 222-280 AD)Regular script
ModernMost common words with 斬
Freq. | Word | Meaning |
---|---|---|
to chop | ||
to behead | ||
to cut off | ||
to eliminate completely | ||
unhesitating |
Historical pronunciation
Old Chinese | Middle Chinese | Pinyin | Gloss |
*[ts]ramʔ | tsreamX | zhǎn | cut off |
Statistics
Not found in HSK word list
Appears in 2.9793% of movies
2820th most common character in movies
2463rd most common character in books
Miscellaneous
Strokes | 11 |
Simplified | |
Unicode | U+65AC |
Shuowen | “斬,也。从車,从斤。斬法車裂也。” |
Sources
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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