mán
barbarians
Phonosemantic compound. 虫 represents the meaning and 䜌 represents the sound.
Evolution

Bronze script
Late Western Zhou (~800 BC)
Seal script
Shuowen (~100 AD)
Clerical script
Cao Wei (Three Kingdoms: 222-280 AD)Regular script
ModernDefinitions
Most common words with 蠻
Freq. | Word | Meaning |
---|---|---|
very | ||
barbarous | ||
rude and unreasonable | ||
savage | ||
to pester endlessly (idiom) |
Historical pronunciation
Old Chinese | Middle Chinese | Pinyin | Gloss |
*mˤro[n] | maen | mán | southern foreigner |
Statistics
Not found in HSK word list
Appears in 12.9425% of movies
1844th most common character in movies
2068th most common character in books
Miscellaneous
Strokes | 25 |
Simplified | |
Unicode | U+883B |
Shuowen | “蠻,南蠻,蛇穜。从虫,聲。” |
Sources
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