yān
smoke
Phonosemantic compound. 火 represents the meaning and 因 represents the sound. Simplified form of 煙.
Evolution

Bronze script
Late Spring and Autumn (~500 BC)
Seal script
Shuowen (~100 AD)
Clerical script
Cao Wei (Three Kingdoms: 222-280 AD)Regular script
ModernDefinitions
Most common words with 烟
Freq. | Word | Meaning |
---|---|---|
smoke | ||
to smoke (a cigarette, tobacco) | ||
to smoke | ||
cigarette | ||
fireworks |
Historical pronunciation
Old Chinese | Middle Chinese | Pinyin | Gloss |
*[q]ˤi[n] | 'en | yān | vapor, smoke |
Statistics
HSK level 3
Appears in 33.3974% of movies
961st most common character in movies
967th most common character in books
Miscellaneous
Strokes | 10 |
Traditional | |
Unicode | U+70DF |
Shuowen | “煙,火气也。从火,垔聲。烟,或从因;,古文;,籀文从宀。” |
Sources
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