朕 - Dong Chinese dictionary

zhèn

pronoun 'I'

Original meaning:

seal up a crack

Originally depicted two hands (廾) holding an object (丨) to patch up a hole in a boat (舟), representing the meaning "seal a crack". The current meaning is a phonetic loan.

Components

舟 Iconic component

zhōu

boat

Depicts a boat. Modern form looks like unrelated 月.

Due to historical stylistic changes, this component is less similar to 舟 than it was in ancient scripts.

◎ Iconic component

characterless component

Depicts a hole in a boat being plugged up.

廾 Iconic component

gǒng

two hands

Depicts two hands patching a hole in a boat.

Due to historical stylistic changes, this component is less similar to 廾 than it was in ancient scripts.

Evolution

Oracle script

(~1250-1000 BC)

Bronze script

Early Western Zhou (~1000 BC)

Seal script

Shuowen (~100 AD)

Clerical script

Western Jin dynasty (266-316 AD)

Regular script

Modern

Definitions

朕

zhèn

pronoun 'I'; I; we (imperial use); subtle

Component uses

Meaning component in 1 character (0 verified)

騰

Sound component in 4 characters (2 verified)

勝胜腾媵

Remnant component in 1 character (1 verified)

胜

Historical pronunciation

Old Chinese	Middle Chinese	Pinyin	Gloss
*lrəmʔ	drimX	zhèn	I, we, our

Statistics

Not found in HSK word list

3054th most common character in books

Miscellaneous

Strokes	10
Unicode	U+6715
Shuowen	“朕，我也。闕。”

Sources

MTSU Chinese text computing

漢語多功能字庫

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