yān
drown
Phonosemantic compound. 氵 represents the meaning and 奄 represents the sound.
Components
Evolution

Seal script
Shuowen (~100 AD)
Clerical script
Eastern Han dynasty (25-220 AD)
Clerical script
Eastern Han dynasty (25-220 AD)Regular script
ModernDefinitions
yān
drown; cover with liquid, steep; to flood; to submerge; to drown; to irritate the skin (of liquids); to delay
Most common words with 淹
Freq. | Word | Meaning |
---|---|---|
to submerge | ||
to drown | ||
to flood | ||
also writer and author of On Yueyang Tower 岳陽樓記|岳阳楼记 | ||
to be flooded |
Historical pronunciation
Old Chinese | Middle Chinese | Pinyin | Gloss |
*ʔ(r)om | 'jem | yān | submerge, soak |
Statistics
Not found in HSK word list
Appears in 6.5033% of movies
2271st most common character in movies
2580th most common character in books
Miscellaneous
Strokes | 11 |
Unicode | U+6DF9 |
Shuowen | “淹,水。出越巂徼外,東入若水。从水,奄聲。” |
Sources
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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