早 - Dong Chinese dictionary

zǎo

early

Phonosemantic compound. 日 represents the meaning and 棗 represents the sound. The form of the original phonetic component 棗 was abbreviated to look like 十.

Components

日 Meaning component

rì

sun

棗 Sound component

zǎo

date tree

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

Evolution

Oracle script

(~1250-1000 BC)

Bronze script

Late Warring States (~250 BC)

Seal script

Shuowen (~100 AD)

Clerical script

Eastern Han dynasty (25-220 AD)

Regular script

Modern

Definitions

早

zǎo

early; soon; morning; Good morning!; long ago; prematurely

Most common words with 早

Freq.	Word	Meaning
	早	early
	早上	early morning
	早就	already at an earlier time
	早餐	breakfast
	早晨	early morning

Component uses

Sound component in 1 character (1 verified)

草

Historical pronunciation

Old Chinese	Middle Chinese	Pinyin	Gloss
*Nə.tsˤuʔ	tsawX	zǎo	early

Statistics

HSK level 1

Appears in 90.8217% of movies

296th most common character in movies

462nd most common character in books

Miscellaneous

Strokes	6
Unicode	U+65E9
Shuowen	“早，晨也。从日在甲上。”

Sources

MTSU Chinese text computing

漢語多功能字庫

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Freq.

Word

Meaning