sī
private
Original meaning:
grain
Phonosemantic compound. 禾 represents the meaning and 厶 represents the sound. Based on the original meaning "grain". The current meaning is a phonetic loan.
Evolution

Bronze script
Late Warring States (~250 BC)
Seal script
Shuowen (~100 AD)
Clerical script
Eastern Han dynasty (25-220 AD)Regular script
ModernDefinitions
Historical pronunciation
Old Chinese | Middle Chinese | Pinyin | Gloss |
*[s]əj | sij | sī | private |
Statistics
HSK level 5
Appears in 54.3008% of movies
807th most common character in movies
1023rd most common character in books
Miscellaneous
Strokes | 7 |
Unicode | U+79C1 |
Shuowen | “私,禾也。从禾,厶聲。北道名禾主人曰私主人。” |
Sources
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

