zāi
calamity
Depicts a fire (火) burning a building (宀).
Evolution
Oracle script
(~1250-1000 BC)
Seal script
Shuowen (~100 AD)
Clerical script
Eastern Han dynasty (25-220 AD)Regular script
ModernDefinitions
Most common words with 灾
Freq. | Word | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
disaster | ||
fire (that burns buildings etc) | ||
disaster | ||
calamity | ||
to relieve disaster |
Historical pronunciation
Old Chinese | Middle Chinese | Pinyin | Gloss |
*[ts]ˤə | tsoj | zāi | calamity |
Statistics
HSK level 5
Appears in 17.0591% of movies
1542nd most common character in movies
1349th most common character in books
Miscellaneous
Strokes | 7 |
Traditional | |
Unicode | U+707E |
Shuowen | “烖，天火曰烖。从火，聲。灾，或从宀、火；，古文从才；災，籀文从。” |
Sources
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
