zhāi
vegetarian diet
Phonosemantic compound. 齊 represents the meaning and 小 represents the sound.
Evolution

Bronze script
Late Spring and Autumn (~500 BC)
Seal script
Shuowen (~100 AD)
Clerical script
Eastern Han dynasty (25-220 AD)Regular script
ModernDefinitions
Most common words with 齋
Freq. | Word | Meaning |
---|---|---|
study room | ||
to fast | ||
Saitō (Japanese surname) | ||
study (room) | ||
Ramadan (Islam) |
Historical pronunciation
Old Chinese | Middle Chinese | Pinyin | Gloss |
*tsˤr[ə]j | tsreaj | zhāi | purify oneself |
Statistics
Not found in HSK word list
2404th most common character in books
Miscellaneous
Strokes | 17 |
Simplified | |
Unicode | U+9F4B |
Shuowen | “齋,戒潔也。从示,齊省聲。,籀文齋从省。” |
Sources
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

