sū
revive
Phonosemantic compound. 艹 represents the meaning and 穌 represents the sound.
Evolution

Bronze script
Early Spring and Autumn (~700 BC)
Seal script
Shuowen (~100 AD)
Clerical script
Eastern Han dynasty (25-220 AD)Regular script
ModernDefinitions
sū
revive, resurrect; a species of thyme; transliteration of 'Soviet'; Perilla frutescens (Chinese basil or wild red basil); place name; to revive; used as phonetic in transliteration
Sū
Most common words with 蘇
Freq. | Word | Meaning |
---|---|---|
place name | ||
Soviet Union, 1922-1991 | ||
Scotland | ||
Jiangsu province (Kiangsu) in southeast China, abbr. 蘇|苏, capital Nanjing 南京 | ||
Suzhou prefecture level city in Jiangsu |
Component uses
Sound component in 1 character (1 verified)
Historical pronunciation
Old Chinese | Middle Chinese | Pinyin | Gloss |
*s-ŋˤa | su | sū | revive |
Statistics
Not found in HSK word list
Appears in 23.5624% of movies
1047th most common character in movies
590th most common character in books
Miscellaneous
Strokes | 19 |
Simplified | |
Unicode | U+8607 |
Shuowen | “蘇,桂荏也。从艸,穌聲。” |
Sources
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

