Chinese Character Wiki
草

cǎo, cào

grass

Phonosemantic compound. 艹 represents the meaning and 早 represents the sound.

Components
艹 sound,meaning component

艹  Sound Meaning component

cao, cǎo

  

grass

艹 is a component form of 艸.

早 sound component

早  Sound component

zǎo

  

early

Evolution

草 Seal script Shuowen (~100 AD)

Seal script

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

Clerical script

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

Regular script

Modern
Definitions

草  

cǎo

grass, straw, thatch, herbs; grass; straw; manuscript; draft (of a document); careless; rough; CL:棵[kē],撮[zuǒ],株[zhū],根[gēn]

草  

cào

variant of 肏[cào]

草 (艸) 

cǎo

variant of 草[cǎo]

Most common words with 草
Freq.
Word
Meaning

草

grass

草案

draft (legislation, proposal etc)

草莓

strawberry

草坪

lawn

烟草

tobacco

Historical pronunciation

Old Chinese

Middle Chinese

Pinyin

Gloss

*[tsʰ]ˤuʔ

tshawX

cǎo

grass, plants

*[tsʰ]ˤuʔ

tshawX

cǎo

rough, coarse


Statistics

HSK level 2

Appears in 31.8276% of movies

1117th most common character in movies

789th most common character in books

Miscellaneous

Strokes

9

Unicode

U+8349

Shuowen

“草，草斗，櫟實也。一曰象斗子。从艸，早聲。”


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