kūn
elder brother
Original meaning:
insect
Depicts an insect. Based on the original meaning "insect", now preserved in the word 昆虫. The current meaning is a phonetic loan.
Evolution

Bronze script
Late Western Zhou (~800 BC)
Seal script
Shuowen (~100 AD)
Clerical script
Eastern Han dynasty (25-220 AD)Regular script
ModernDefinitions
Most common words with 昆
Freq. | Word | Meaning |
---|---|---|
insect | ||
Kunming prefecture-level city and capital of Yunnan province in southwest China | ||
descendant | ||
Kunlun (Karakorum) mountain range in Xinjiang | ||
Kunming, prefecture-level city and capital of Yunnan province in southwest China |
Historical pronunciation
Old Chinese | Middle Chinese | Pinyin | Gloss |
*[k]ˤu[n] | kwon | kūn | elder brother |
Statistics
Not found in HSK word list
Appears in 3.3477% of movies
2333rd most common character in movies
1759th most common character in books
Miscellaneous
Strokes | 8 |
Unicode | U+6606 |
Shuowen | “昆,同也。从日,从比。” |
Sources
李学勤《字源》p.608
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