měi
every
Original meaning:
young woman of marriageable age
Pictograph of a woman (母) with a hairpin in her hair. In ancient China, women of marriageable age wore a hairpin. Based on the original meaning "young woman" The current meaning is a phonetic loan.
Evolution

Oracle script
(~1250-1000 BC)
Bronze script
Early Western Zhou (~1000 BC)
Seal script
Shuowen (~100 AD)
Clerical script
Eastern Han dynasty (25-220 AD)Regular script
ModernDefinitions
Component uses
Unknown component in 1 character (0 verified)
Historical pronunciation
Old Chinese | Middle Chinese | Pinyin | Gloss |
*mˤəʔ | mwojX | měi | each |
Statistics
HSK level 3
Appears in 92.6478% of movies
276th most common character in movies
359th most common character in books
Miscellaneous
Strokes | 7 |
Unicode | U+6BCF |
Shuowen | “,艸盛上出也。从屮,母聲。” |
Sources
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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