Learn Chinese Chinese-English Dictionary User's Guide

Character Etymology Results Tab

The Character Etymology Results Tab consists of the following sections:

• Identification
• Character Formation
• External References
• Character Decomposition
• Non-phonetic Component of ...
• Phonetic Component of ....

Identification Section

Displays the character in large size together with its pinyin pronunciation. You can also click on the speech balloon icon to listen to the pronunciation.

Character Formation Section

Definition

Self-explanatory.

Formation Method

Identifies how the character was formed according to the traditional classifications of Chinese character etymology known as Liu Shu (六書), a classification scheme that was first presented by Xu Shen (許慎) in the Shuowen Jiezi (說文解字) during the Eastern Han period

• Pictographic. The character originated as a picture of an actual object., such as 日 or 羊, which are pictures of the sun and a goat, respectively.
• Indicative. There are two types. The first is a character that is an arbitraryl creation used to depict an abstract concept, such as 上 (above) and 下 (below) or 一, 二, 三. The second type uses a combination of a picture and indicator mark to point to the area being defined, such as 本(root)，which is a picture of a tree with an indicator marking the area where the root is.
• Associative Compound. The character is composed of two or more components which together convey the desired meaning, such as 坐 (sit) which is composed of two people 人 sitting above the ground 土.
• Pictophonetic. The character is composed of at least two components and one of them provide an indication of the prnunciation while the rest provide an indication of the meaning, such as 按 (to push), where the 安 component indicates that the character is pronunced like "an" but its meaning has something to do with the hand 扌.
• Mutually Explanatory. This category is rarely used because there is no consensus as to what characters belong here as the author of the term did not clearly define it.
• Phonetic Loan. The character originally had a completely unrelated meaning but because there weren't enough characters at the dawn of writing, scribes borrowed other characters that had the same pronunciation. In many cases, the character's original meaning is no longer associated with the character or has been lost or the original meaning is now expressed by a modification of the original character. For example, the character 因 (as in 因爲） currently meaning "cause" is a phonetic loan as the character originally indicated some form of mattress. Since 因 took on this new meaning, the original meaning is now expressed by 茵, where the 艹 grass radical is used to re-clarify that the character is about a grass mattress. These re-clarified characters are identified in the YellowBridge dictionary as Pictophonetic-Re-clarified.

This classification is not meant to be mutually exclusive. The first four classes are based on character formation while the last two are based on character usage.

This dictionary also provides the following entries when appropriate:

• Suggested Mnemonics. Generally speaking, we believe that characters should be memorized using the mnemonics that is built into the character itself rather than via modern day inventions. However, there are some instances where there is no consensus on the true origin of a character and multiple theories abound. In those cases, we have chosen what we believe the most likely origin as the main classification but may also list alternate interpretations under Suggested Mnemonics, especially when the alternate interpretation is more suitable to the modern meaning and form of the character.
• Characters related by etymology. Some characters are the inverted or mirrored form of others although they may not appear as such at first sight.
• Pointer to traditional character etymology. In the case of simplified characters, we provide a pointer to the traditional character.

Simplification Method

The simplified forms of Chinese characters were first published in 1964 and republished in 1986 in 简化字总表. This part of the dictionary identifies the rule which was folllowed to arrive at the simplified form. The main rules are as follow:

• Created as unique simplification. One-of-a-kind simplifications which cannot be generalized to other characters even if they contain the simplified character as a component.. Example: 個 » 个, 後 » 后. As the second example illustrates, the simplified character may not be an entirely new character but the adoption of an existing character with a similar sound and giving it a new meaning in addition to its previous one.
• Promoted a historical variant to be the simplified form. Example: 掛 » 挂, 兇 » 凶.
• Created as generic character simplification or derived from all characters containing the simplified character as a component (unless already covered by the unique simplification rule). Example: 貝 » 贝 and all characters containing them, such as 員, 費, 貴 becoming 员,费, 贵, etc.
• Created as generic radical simplification or derived from all characters containing the simplified character as a component (unless already covered by the unique simplification rule). Example: 言 » 讠and all characters containing them, such as 說, 話, 許 becoming 说, 话, 许, etc.

External References Section

Contains links to external pages that may provide addiitonal insight into the current character.

Character Decomposition Section

Etymology Explorer

Immediately below the root of the tree (identified by the microscope icon) is the node representing the character itself. Opening this node, by clicking on the plus icon, will do two things:

• First, it will show how the children components are grouped, and
• second, it will show what the children components are, together with their pronunciation and meaning, if appropriate.

Component Grouping Icon

The grouping mechanism is shown via one of thirteen icons, which are shown on the left. The children component will follow a sequence that matches the grouping mechanism. For example, in the left-to-right grouping, the first child will be the left component while the second child will be the right component. All groups consist of exactly two children except for:

• the left-to-middle-and-below and above-to-middle-and-below groups, which consist of three children each, and
• the variation icon, which is a unary operator that is used to indicate that a certain component is a variation of another one.

Note, however, that whenever possible the characters are decomposed based on their etymological origin, not their apparent shape. Hence, many character which would appear to be composed of three parts, such as 謝, may in fact be decomposed into two (言, its semantic component, and 射, its phonetic component).

The children components can be:

• a bona fide character which can stand alone with its own meaning and pronunciation;
• a radical, i.e. one of 214 components better known as the Kang Xi radicals;
• or a character fragment.

This last component merits some explanation. Contrary to popular belief, the Kang Xi radicals are not the elementary particles from which all characters are formed. The radicals were selected as possible dictionary search keys and hence it was sufficient that every character have at least one of the 214 radicals. This means that many characters contain parts which are not bona fide characters or radicals themselves but which may (or may not) occur with some regularity. Some fragments originated as bona fide characters in ancient times but now only exist as part of other characters. In some cases the unnamed component is further decomposable into subcomponents which may include bona fide characters and radicals. However, more often than not, these fragments, for lack of a better term, may not displayable because they are not included in the standard fonts.

Note: To be able to view as many of these fragments as possible, users not running Windows Vista may need to install Chinese Extension Fonts.

Non-phonetic Component of ... Section

(Subscribers only section). Contains a list of the characters which contain the current character as a non-phonetic component. The list is sort in descending order of frequency of use. Move your mouse pointer over a character to see additiional information about the character.

Phonetic Component of ... Section

(Subscribers only section). Contains a list of the characters which contain the current character as a phonetic component, each row containing one of the possible pronunciations. Within each row, the list is sort in descending order of frequency of use. Move your mouse pointer over a character to see additiional information about the character.

See also

• Access the Character Etymology Dictionary
• YellowBridge Chinese English Dictionary