yuán

member

Original meaning: 

round

Depicts the round opening () of a cooking pot (). Based on the original meaning "round", now written as . The current meaning is a phonetic loan.

Components
◎ iconic component

  Iconic component

  

characterless component

Depicts a circle.

鼎 iconic,remnant component

  Iconic Remnant component

dǐng

  

cooking pot

Evolution

員 Oracle script (~1250-1000 BC)

Oracle script

(~1250-1000 BC)
員 Bronze script Early Western Zhou (~1000 BC)

Bronze script

Early Western Zhou (~1000 BC)
員 Seal script Shuowen (~100 AD)

Seal script

Shuowen (~100 AD)
員 Clerical script Eastern Han dynasty (25-220 AD)

Clerical script

Eastern Han dynasty (25-220 AD)
員 Regular script Modern

Regular script

Modern
Definitions

() 

yuán

member; personnel, staff member; person; employee

Most common words with 員
Freq.
Word
Meaning

人员

staff

person

演员

performer

成员

member

委员会

committee

Component uses

Meaning component in 1 character (0 verified)

Sound component in 8 characters (2 verified)

Historical pronunciation

Old Chinese

Middle Chinese

Pinyin

Gloss

*ɢʷ<r>en

hjwen

yuán

circle; round

*[ɢ]ʷə[n]

hjun

yún

(a particle)


Statistics

Not found in HSK word list

Appears in 82.9249% of movies

265th most common character in movies

200th most common character in books

Miscellaneous

Strokes

10

Simplified

Unicode

U+54E1

Shuowen

“員,物數也。从貝,口聲。鼎,籀文从鼎。”


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