xiān, xiǎn
fresh
Phonosemantic compound. 魚 represents the meaning and 祥 represents the sound.
Evolution

Bronze script
Late Western Zhou (~800 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][a]r | sjen | xiān | fresh; good |
*s[a]r | sjen | xiān | 鮮卑 *s[a]r.pe Xiānbēi |
*[s][e]rʔ | sjenX | xiǎn | rare, few |
Statistics
Not found in HSK word list
Appears in 27.7911% of movies
1290th most common character in movies
958th most common character in books
Miscellaneous
Strokes | 17 |
Simplified | |
Unicode | U+9BAE |
Shuowen | “鮮,魚名,出貉國。从魚,羴省聲。” |
Sources
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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