tè
special
Original meaning:
bull
Phonosemantic compound. 牛 represents the meaning and 寺 represents the sound. Based on the original meaning "bull". The meaning later shifted to "prominent" and "special".
Evolution

Seal script
Shuowen (~100 AD)
Clerical script
Western Han dynasty (202 BC-9 AD)
Clerical script
Eastern Han dynasty (25-220 AD)
Clerical script
Eastern Han dynasty (25-220 AD)Regular script
ModernDefinitions
Most common words with 特
Freq. | Word | Meaning |
---|---|---|
especially | ||
special | ||
special | ||
trait | ||
(fashion) model (loanword) |
Historical pronunciation
Old Chinese | Middle Chinese | Pinyin | Gloss |
*[d]ˤək | dok | tè | bull |
Statistics
HSK level 6
Appears in 87.6181% of movies
171st most common character in movies
173rd most common character in books
Miscellaneous
Strokes | 10 |
Unicode | U+7279 |
Shuowen | “特,朴特,牛父也。从牛,寺聲。” |
Sources
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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