Kilo Lingo

字

zì

Traditional: 字

#1256 of 5,000 Core 5000

Translation

character, written word

Word origin

The character shows a child 子 under a roof 宀, an image of raising offspring. It was extended to mean characters, which were thought of as being born from simpler graphs.

Origin
associative compound
Root
宀 (roof) + 子 (zǐ, child)

Stroke order

Stroke order for 字

字

Examples

？

How do you read this character?

。

His handwriting is very beautiful.

。

I do not recognise this character.

。

Please write your name here.

千qiān。

Chinese has tens of thousands of characters.

字 (zì) means a character or written word. It is the basic unit of the Chinese writing system.

Appears in 4 words

Multi-character compounds in the corpus that contain 字.

名字míng zìname (of a person or thing)字幕zì mùsubtitles, captions字幕组zì mù zǔsubtitling group, fansub team数字shù zìnumber, numeral, figure, digit

Used in

Grammar articles

(9)

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This word is part of lesson 26.