Chinese Character Wiki
要

yào, yāo

want

Original meaning: 

waist

Pictograph of two hands grabbing a woman's (女) waist. The current meaning "want" is a phonetic loan. The original meaning "waist" is now written as 腰.

Components
◎ iconic component

◎  Iconic component

  

characterless component

Depicts two hands grabbing a waist.

女 iconic component

女  Iconic component

nǚ, rǔ

  

woman

Evolution

要 Seal script Shuowen (~100 AD)

Seal script

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

Clerical script

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

Regular script

Modern
Definitions

要  

yào

necessary, essential; necessity; important; vital; to want; to ask for; will; going to (as future auxiliary); may; must; (used in a comparison) must be; probably; if

要  

yāo

to demand; to request; to coerce

Most common words with 要
Freq.
Word
Meaning

要

vital

需要

to need

不要

don't!

重要

important

要求

to request

Component uses

Sound component in 3 characters (2 verified)

票 腰 崾

Remnant component in 1 character (1 verified)

票

Historical pronunciation

Old Chinese

Middle Chinese

Pinyin

Gloss

*[q]ew(k)-s

'jiewH

yào

important


Statistics

HSK level 1

Appears in 100.0000% of movies

19th most common character in movies

26th most common character in books

Miscellaneous

Strokes

9

Unicode

U+8981

Shuowen

“要，身中也，象人要自之形。从，交省聲。”


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Creative Commons License