yú, yū, wū
in
Originally a variant form of 烏, which is a pictograph of a crow. The current use as a function word is a phonetic loan.
Evolution

Bronze script
Early Western Zhou (~1000 BC)
Seal script
Shuowen (~100 AD)
Clerical script
Qin dynasty (221-206 BC)Regular script
ModernDefinitions
Historical pronunciation
Old Chinese | Middle Chinese | Pinyin | Gloss |
*[ʔ]ˤa | 'u | wū | oh! |
*[ʔ]a | 'jo | yú | at (locative preposition) |
Statistics
Not found in HSK word list
Appears in 0.5927% of movies
2746th most common character in movies
2025th most common character in books
Miscellaneous
Strokes | 8 |
Simplified | |
Unicode | U+65BC |
Shuowen | “烏,孝鳥也。象形。孔子曰:‘烏,呼也。’取其助气,故以為烏呼。,古文烏,象形。於,象古文烏省。” |
Sources
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