昨 - Dong Chinese dictionary

zuó

yesterday

Phonosemantic compound. 日 represents the meaning and 乍 represents the sound.

Components

日 Meaning component

rì

sun

乍 Sound component

zhà

suddenly

昨 and 乍 don't sound similar in modern Mandarin due to historical phonetic changes. They were more similar in older Chinese.昨 /*[dz]ˤak/
乍 /*[dz]ˤrak-s/

Evolution

Seal script

Shuowen (~100 AD)

Clerical script

Western Han dynasty (202 BC-9 AD)

Regular script

Modern

Definitions

昨

zuó

yesterday; in former times, past

Most common words with 昨

Freq.	Word	Meaning
	昨天	yesterday
	昨晚	last night
	昨日	yesterday
	昨	yesterday
	昨夜	last night

Historical pronunciation

Old Chinese	Middle Chinese	Pinyin	Gloss
*[dz]ˤak	dzak	zuó	yesterday

Statistics

HSK level 1

Appears in 60.8522% of movies

634th most common character in movies

1475th most common character in books

Miscellaneous

Strokes	9
Unicode	U+6628
Shuowen	“昨，壘日也。从日，乍聲。”

Sources

MTSU Chinese text computing

漢語多功能字庫

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Meaning