他
Meanings
CC-CEDICT
- 1.(third-person singular) (since the early 20th century, usu. male) he; him; his
- 2.(bound form) other; another; some other (as in 他日[tā rì] and 他人[tā rén])
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Wiktionary
- 1.he; him; she; her
- 2.A dummy pronoun. Compare object pronoun 之 (zhī)
- 3.other; another
- 4.a surname
- 5.Used in transcription.
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Etymology
Phono-semantic compound (形聲 /形声, OC *l̥ʰaːl): semantic 亻 (“man”) + phonetic 也 (OC *laːlʔ). Corrupted form of 佗 (OC *l̥ʰaːl, *l'aːl), which is found in Zuozhuan. Etymology not clear (Schuessler, 2007). Perhaps cognate with 誃 (OC *l'al, *l̥ʰjalʔ, “to separate”). The modern sense of "he, she, it" only emerged after the Han period in colloquial passages, and displaced classical 其 (OC *ɡɯ) and 之 (OC *tjɯ) in Mandarin dialects (Pulleyblank, 1995). The phonological development from Middle Chinese was irregular. The expected reflex is tuō, which is sometimes used in literary contexts for the classical "other" sense, but in most Mandarin dialects it is read like tā.
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Stroke order
Components
Components from cjk-decomp · MIT
Example sentences
他跑。
He runs.
他高。
He is tall.
他是誰？
Who's he?
抓住他。
Grab him.
他来了。
He came.
他跑了。
He ran.
Sentences from Tatoeba · CC-BY 2.0 FR
More examples & usage (AI)
Synonyms
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Derived terms
Wiktionary · CC BY-SA