xián
salty
Phonosemantic compound. 鹵 represents the meaning and 咸 represents the sound.
Evolution

Seal script
Shuowen (~100 AD)
Seal script
Western Han dynasty (202 BC-9 AD)
Clerical script
Cao Wei (Three Kingdoms: 222-280 AD)Regular script
ModernMost common words with 鹹
Freq. | Word | Meaning |
---|---|---|
all | ||
salted fish | ||
pickles | ||
bacon | ||
Xianyang prefecture level city in Shaanxi |
Historical pronunciation
Old Chinese | Middle Chinese | Pinyin | Gloss |
*Cə.[g]ˤr[o]m | heam | xián | salty |
Statistics
Not found in HSK word list
Appears in 2.8672% of movies
2738th most common character in movies
2525th most common character in books
Miscellaneous
Strokes | 20 |
Simplified | |
Unicode | U+9E79 |
Shuowen | “鹹,銜也。北方味也。从鹵,咸聲。” |
Sources
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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