yǐ
by means of
Original meaning:
carry
Depicts a person (人) carrying something.
Components
Evolution

Oracle script
(~1250-1000 BC)
Bronze script
Early Western Zhou (~1000 BC)
Seal script
Shuowen (~100 AD)
Clerical script
Eastern Han dynasty (25-220 AD)Regular script
ModernDefinitions
Most common words with 以
Freq. | Word | Meaning |
---|---|---|
can | ||
to use | ||
therefore | ||
to think (i.e. to take it to be true that ...) (Usually there is an implication that the notion is mistaken – except when expressing one's own current opinion.) | ||
before |
Historical pronunciation
Old Chinese | Middle Chinese | Pinyin | Gloss |
*ləʔ | yiX | yǐ | take, use |
Statistics
Not found in HSK word list
Appears in 99.9199% of movies
44th most common character in movies
23rd most common character in books
Miscellaneous
Strokes | 4 |
Unicode | U+4EE5 |
Shuowen | “,用也。从反已。賈侍中說,已,意已實也。象形。” |
Sources
季旭昇《說文新證》p.980
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