shuōshuì

speak

Phonosemantic compound. represents the meaning and represents the sound.

Components
讠 meaning component

  Meaning component

yán

  

speech

is a component form of .

兑 sound component

  Sound component

duì

  

exchange

Evolution

说 Seal script Shuowen (~100 AD)

Seal script

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

Clerical script

Eastern Han dynasty (25-220 AD)
说 Traditional script Modern

Traditional script

Modern
说 Simplified script Modern

Simplified script

Modern
Definitions

() 

shuō

speak, say, talk; scold, upbraid; to speak; to say; to explain; to scold; to tell off; a theory (typically the last character in a compound, as in 日心說|日心说 heliocentric theory)

() 

shuì

to persuade

() 

shuō

variant of |[shuō]

Most common words with 说
Freq.
Word
Meaning

to speak

说话

to speak

说明

to explain

听说

hearsay

说道

to state

Historical pronunciation

Old Chinese

Middle Chinese

Pinyin

Gloss

*l̥ot-s

sywejH

shuì

exhort

*l̥ot

sywet

shuō

speak, explain

*lot

ywet

yuè

pleased


Statistics

HSK level 1

Appears in 100.0000% of movies

25th most common character in movies

24th most common character in books

Miscellaneous

Strokes

9

Traditional

Unicode

U+8BF4


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