夕

Meanings

Etymology

Pictogram (象形) — moon crescent. Compare to its ancient variant 月. Related to 汐 (OC *ljaːɡ, “evening tide”). Schuessler (2007) suggests it is from Proto-Sino-Tibetan *rV-jak (“day; full day; to spend the night”); cognate with Tibetan ཞག (zhag, “day (24 hours)”), Mizo riak (“to pass the night”), Jingpho [script needed] (jaʔ⁵⁵, “day (24 hours)”), Burmese ရက် (rak, “day (24 hours)”), Lahu há (“night; to pass the night”); may also be cognate with 宿 (OC *suɡs, *suɡ, “to spend the night”) and 昔 (OC *sjaːɡ, “former times”). It is noted that in the oracle bone script, the 24 hour day started and ended some time in the evening or night. Since 日 (rì, “sun”) has acquired the meaning of "day (24 hours)", 夕 was then restricted to the time of the day's end. On the other hand, STEDT suggests 夕 (OC *ljaːɡ, “evening; night”) was derived from Proto-Sino-Tibetan *ja-n (“night”), from which 夜 (OC *laːɡs, “night”) was also derived. However, 夕 was also compared to Proto-Sino-Tibetan *rV-jak (“day; full day; to spend the night”). Schuessler (2007) assigns Chinese 夜 (yè) to *ja (“night”) instead, and notes *ja (“night”) and *ryak (“day (24 hours)”) were kept strictly separate in Tibeto-Burman.

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Stroke order

Components

Components from cjk-decomp · MIT

Example sentences

• 美麗的夕陽，不是嗎？

  A beautiful sunset, isn't it?

• 你看過這麼美的夕陽嗎?

  Have you ever seen such a beautiful sunset?

Sentences from Tatoeba · CC-BY 2.0 FR

More examples & usage (AI)

Synonyms

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Derived terms

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Related words