嚴 - Dong Chinese dictionary

yán

strict

Phonosemantic compound. 喦 represents the meaning and 敢 represents the sound. Based on the original meaning "exaggerate". The meaning later shifted to "extreme", "severe", and "strict".

Components

喦 Meaning component

niè

talkative

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

敢 Sound component

gǎn

to dare

Evolution

Bronze script

Late Western Zhou (~800 BC)

Seal script

Shuowen (~100 AD)

Clerical script

Eastern Han dynasty (25-220 AD)

Regular script

Modern

Definitions

严 (嚴)

yán

strict, rigorous, rigid; stern; tight (closely sealed); strict; rigorous; severe; father

严 (嚴)

Yán

surname Yan

Most common words with 嚴

Freq.	Word	Meaning
	严重	grave
	严格	strict
	严肃	solemn
	尊严	dignity
	严	stern

Component uses

Sound component in 2 characters (0 verified)

巖儼

Historical pronunciation

Old Chinese	Middle Chinese	Pinyin	Gloss
*ŋ(r)am	ngjaem	yán	stern, majestic

Statistics

Not found in HSK word list

Appears in 55.2619% of movies

855th most common character in movies

545th most common character in books

Miscellaneous

Strokes	19
Simplified	严
Unicode	U+56B4
Shuowen	“嚴，教命急也。从吅，聲。，古文。”

Sources

MTSU Chinese text computing

漢語多功能字庫

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Freq.

Word

Meaning