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Meanings

CC-CEDICT

  1. 1.slave

CC-CEDICT · CC BY-SA

Wiktionary

  1. 1.slave; servant
  2. 2.I
  3. 3.a person associated with a particular identity or trait
  4. 4.to enslave
  5. 5.Used in transcription.

Wiktionary · CC BY-SA

Etymology

Ideogrammic compound (會意 /会意): 女 (“woman”) + 又 (“hand”) – a hand capturing and ordering a woman around. 女 (OC *naʔ, *nas) may also be phonetic. Some oracle bone script forms (not depicted above) are pictographic (象形), showing a person (probably a woman) with hands crossed at the back, as opposed to 女 which depicts a woman clasping her hands in front of the body. Uncertain. *Possibly cognate with Mru nar (“servant”) & Awa-Khumi Chin tana (Löffler, 1960); *Ferlus (1999) relates this to 女 (OC *naʔ), which has semantic parallel, especially among foreign loans (e.g. 嬯 (OC *dɯː, “servant, slave woman”) which is possibly from Austroasiatic). * Unger (1990) groups 奴 (OC *naː) as well as 努 (OC *naːʔ, “to tense, to exert”), 弩 (OC *naːʔ, “crossbow”), & 怒 (OC *naːs, “angry”), in a word-family with the basic meaning "tense", hence 奴 (OC *naː)'s meaning "press into service".

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Stroke order

Components

Components from cjk-decomp · MIT

Example sentences

Sentences from Tatoeba · CC-BY 2.0 FR

More examples & usage (AI)

Synonyms

Wiktionary · CC BY-SA

Derived terms

Wiktionary · CC BY-SA

Related words