Chinese Character Wiki
番

fān, pān

to take turns

Original meaning: 

animal's paw

Depicts an animal's claw (釆) with their paw shown. 釆 also represents the sound. Based on the original meaning "animal's paw", now written as 蹯. The current meaning is a phonetic loan.

Components
釆 sound,iconic component

釆  Sound Iconic component

biàn

  

distinguish

Used here to depict an animal's claw.

◎ iconic component

◎  Iconic component

  

characterless component

Depicts an animal's paw. Modern form looks like unrelated 田.

Evolution

番 Bronze script Late Western Zhou (~800 BC)

Bronze script

Late Western Zhou (~800 BC)
番 Seal script Shuowen (~100 AD)

Seal script

Shuowen (~100 AD)
番 Clerical script Eastern Han dynasty (25-220 AD)

Clerical script

Eastern Han dynasty (25-220 AD)
番 Regular script Modern

Regular script

Modern
Definitions

番  

fān

to take turns; a turn, a time; to repeat; foreign (non-Chinese); barbarian; classifier for occurrences (of an event, action or speech utterance); classifier for iterations: times, -fold (as in twofold etc); classifier for situations: kind, sort

番  

Pān

surname Pan

Most common words with 番
Freq.
Word
Meaning

番

barbarian

番茄

tomato

番茄酱

ketchup

轮番

in turn

翻番

to double

Component uses

Meaning component in 1 character (0 verified)

燔

Sound component in 10 characters (3 verified)

翻 播 蹯 潘 幡 蕃 蟠 燔 鄱 皤

Historical pronunciation

Old Chinese

Middle Chinese

Pinyin

Gloss

*pˤar

pa

bō

martial

*pʰar

phjon

fān

a turn, a time


Statistics

HSK level 6

Appears in 14.2560% of movies

1872nd most common character in movies

1452nd most common character in books

Miscellaneous

Strokes

12

Unicode

U+756A

Shuowen

“番，獸足謂之番。从采，田象其掌。番或从足、从煩。，古文番。”


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