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Meanings

CC-CEDICT

  1. 1.to marry off (a daughter)
  1. 1.(bound form) wife

CC-CEDICT · CC BY-SA

Wiktionary

  1. 1.wife
  2. 2.to give a wife to; to give as a wife; to become married to a man
  3. 3.to marry a woman

Wiktionary · CC BY-SA

Etymology

Ideogrammic compound (會意 /会意): 肀 (“hand grabbing hair”) + 女 (“woman”) ― a man grabbing a woman's hair to show ownership (marriage by capture). Thought to be cognate to 齊 (OC *dzêi, “same, equal (adj.), in line”) (SWJZhttps://ctext.org/shuo-wen-jie-zi/nv-bu#n34692; Karlgren, 1956) & interpreted as "an equal to her husband"; yet this is unlikely considering the realities of ancient societies (Schuessler, 2007). Schuessler instead proposes Austroasiatic etymology: he reconstructs 妻 (OC *tshə̂i) < *k-sə̂i and compares it to Middle Khmer [script needed] (kansai, “wife”) (whence Khmer កន្សៃ (kɑɑkɑnsay, “wife”)) and Khmer [script needed] (*khsay, “be female”) with *ka(n)- being a female marker (ibid.).

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Stroke order

Components

Components from cjk-decomp · MIT

More examples & usage (AI)

Synonyms

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Derived terms

Wiktionary · CC BY-SA

Related words