wa

wow!

Phonosemantic compound. represents the meaning and represents the sound.

Components
口 meaning component

  Meaning component

kǒu

  

mouth

圭 sound component

  Sound component

guī

  

jade pointed at top

Evolution

哇 Seal script Shuowen (~100 AD)

Seal script

Shuowen (~100 AD)
哇 Regular script Modern

Regular script

Modern
Definitions

 

wa

vomit; cry of an infant; replaces [a] when following the vowel "u" or "ao"

 

Wow!; sound of child's crying; sound of vomiting

Most common words with 哇
Freq.
Word
Meaning

Wow!

哇哇

sound of crying

爪哇

Java (island of Indonesia)

哇塞

(slang) wow!

爪哇岛

Java (island of Indonesia)

Statistics

HSK level 6

Appears in 52.0743% of movies

625th most common character in movies

2433rd most common character in books

Miscellaneous

Strokes

9

Unicode

U+54C7

Shuowen

“哇,諂聲也。从口,圭聲。”


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Creative Commons License