nì
disobey
Originally written as 屰, a pictograph of an upside-down person. The 辶 (walk) component was added later, representing a person walking in the wrong direction.
Components
Evolution

Oracle script
(~1250-1000 BC)
Bronze script
Early Western Zhou (~1000 BC)
Seal script
Shuowen (~100 AD)
Clerical script
Eastern Han dynasty (25-220 AD)Regular script
ModernDefinitions
nì
disobey, rebel; rebel, traitor; contrary; opposite; backwards; to go against; to oppose; to betray; to rebel
Historical pronunciation
Old Chinese | Middle Chinese | Pinyin | Gloss |
*ŋrak | ngjaek | nì | go against |
Statistics
Not found in HSK word list
Appears in 6.9678% of movies
2310th most common character in movies
1975th most common character in books
Miscellaneous
Strokes | 9 |
Unicode | U+9006 |
Shuowen | “逆,迎也。从辵,屰聲。關東曰逆,關西曰迎。” |
Sources
季旭昇《說文新證》p.147-148
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

