zāi
calamity
Depicts a fire (火) and a flood (𡿧).
Evolution

Oracle script
(~1250-1000 BC)
Seal script
Shuowen (~100 AD)
Clerical script
Eastern Han dynasty (25-220 AD)Regular script
ModernMost common words with 災
Freq. | Word | Meaning |
---|---|---|
disaster | ||
fire (that burns buildings etc) | ||
disaster | ||
calamity | ||
to relieve disaster |
Historical pronunciation
Old Chinese | Middle Chinese | Pinyin | Gloss |
*[ts]ˤə | tsoj | zāi | calamity |
Statistics
Not found in HSK word list
Appears in 17.0591% of movies
1542nd most common character in movies
1349th most common character in books
Miscellaneous
Strokes | 7 |
Simplified | |
Unicode | U+707D |
Shuowen | “烖,天火曰烖。从火,聲。灾,或从宀、火;,古文从才;災,籀文从。” |
Sources
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

