Chinese Character Wiki
於

yú, yū, wū

in

Originally a variant form of 烏, which is a pictograph of a crow. The current use as a function word is a phonetic loan.

Evolution

於 Bronze script Early Western Zhou (~1000 BC)

Bronze script

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

Seal script

Shuowen (~100 AD)
於 Clerical script Qin dynasty (221-206 BC)

Clerical script

Qin dynasty (221-206 BC)
於 Regular script Modern

Regular script

Modern
Definitions

于 (於) 

yú

in, at, on; interjection alas!; in; at; to; from; by; than; out of

於  

Yū

surname Yu; Taiwan pr. [Yú]

於  

wū

(literary) Oh!; Ah!

Component uses

Sound component in 5 characters (0 verified)

淤 瘀 閼 阏 菸

Historical pronunciation

Old Chinese

Middle Chinese

Pinyin

Gloss

*[ʔ]ˤa

'u

wū

oh!

*[ʔ]a

'jo

yú

at (locative preposition)


Statistics

Not found in HSK word list

Appears in 0.5927% of movies

2746th most common character in movies

2025th most common character in books

Miscellaneous

Strokes

8

Simplified

于

Unicode

U+65BC

Shuowen

“烏，孝鳥也。象形。孔子曰：‘烏，呼也。’取其助气，故以為烏呼。，古文烏，象形。於，象古文烏省。”


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