biàn
distinguish
Original meaning:
to cut into two parts
刂 (knife) added between two 辛 (chisel) components or 辡 conveying the original meaning "to cut into two parts". The meaning has shifted over time and now means "distinguish". 辡 also provides the sound.
Components
Evolution

Bronze script
Early Western Zhou (~1000 BC)
Seal script
Shuowen (~100 AD)
Clerical script
Qin dynasty (221-206 BC)Regular script
ModernDefinitions
Most common words with 辨
Freq. | Word | Meaning |
---|---|---|
to distinguish | ||
to recognize | ||
resolution (of images, monitors, scanners etc) | ||
to distinguish | ||
to differentiate |
Historical pronunciation
Old Chinese | Middle Chinese | Pinyin | Gloss |
*[b]renʔ | bjenX | biàn | distinguish |
Statistics
Not found in HSK word list
Appears in 9.5147% of movies
2110th most common character in movies
1910th most common character in books
Miscellaneous
Strokes | 16 |
Unicode | U+8FA8 |
Shuowen | “辦,判也。从刀,辡聲。” |
Sources
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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