yán
salt
Phonosemantic compound. 監 represents the sound and 鹵 represents the meaning.
Evolution

Bronze script
Late Shang dynasty (~1100 BC)
Seal script
Shuowen (~100 AD)
Clerical script
Eastern Han dynasty (25-220 AD)Regular script
ModernMost common words with 鹽
Freq. | Word | Meaning |
---|---|---|
salt | ||
Yanshui town in Tainan county 台南縣|台南县[Táinánxiàn], Taiwan | ||
Salt Lake City, capital of Utah | ||
hydrochloric acid HCl | ||
edible salt |
Historical pronunciation
Old Chinese | Middle Chinese | Pinyin | Gloss |
*[ɢr][o]m | yem | yán | salt (n.) |
*[ɢr][o]m-s | yemH | yàn | salt (v.) |
Statistics
Not found in HSK word list
Appears in 7.7847% of movies
2064th most common character in movies
1885th most common character in books
Miscellaneous
Strokes | 24 |
Simplified | |
Unicode | U+9E7D |
Shuowen | “鹽,鹹也。从鹵,監聲。古者宿沙初作煮海鹽。” |
Sources
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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