xū
need
Original meaning:
become wet
Pictograph of a person standing under the rain (雨), representing the meaning "become wet", now written as 濡. The current meaning is a phonetic loan. The person component was later replaced with the phonetic component 而.
Evolution

Bronze script
Early Western Zhou (~1000 BC)
Seal script
Shuowen (~100 AD)
Clerical script
Eastern Han dynasty (25-220 AD)Regular script
ModernDefinitions
Historical pronunciation
Old Chinese | Middle Chinese | Pinyin | Gloss |
*s-no | sju | xū | wait |
Statistics
Not found in HSK word list
Appears in 96.3159% of movies
175th most common character in movies
408th most common character in books
Miscellaneous
Strokes | 14 |
Unicode | U+9700 |
Shuowen | “需,也,遇雨不進止也。从雨,而聲。《易》曰:‘雲上於天,需。’” |
Sources
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