zāo

sediment, rotten, ruined

Phonosemantic compound. represents the meaning and represents the sound.

Components
米 meaning component

  Meaning component

  

rice

曹 sound component

  Sound component

cáo

  

plaintiff and defendant

Evolution

糟 Seal script Shuowen (~100 AD)

Seal script

Shuowen (~100 AD)
糟 Clerical script Western Han dynasty (202 BC-9 AD)

Clerical script

Western Han dynasty (202 BC-9 AD)
糟 Regular script Modern

Regular script

Modern
Definitions

 

zāo

sediment, dregs; pickle; dregs; draff; pickled in wine; rotten; messy; ruined

Most common words with 糟
Freq.
Word
Meaning

糟糕

too bad

dregs

乱七八糟

at sixes and sevens

一团糟

chaos

糟蹋

to waste

Historical pronunciation

Old Chinese

Middle Chinese

Pinyin

Gloss

*[ts]ˤu

tsaw

zāo

dregs


Statistics

HSK level 5

Appears in 71.8405% of movies

537th most common character in movies

1918th most common character in books

Miscellaneous

Strokes

17

Unicode

U+7CDF

Shuowen

“糟,酒滓也。从米,曹聲。,籀文从酉。”


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