Skip to content
Inkstone
Sign in

台湾

臺灣
Tái wān

Meanings

CC-CEDICT

Tái wān
  1. 1.Taiwan
Tái wān
  1. 1.variant of 台湾[Tái wān]

CC-CEDICT · CC BY-SA

Wiktionary

  1. 1.Taiwan (island)
  2. 2.Taiwan Province (administrative division in both the Republic of China and People's Republic of China)
  3. 3.Taiwan Area (Taiwan, Penghu, Kinmen, Matsu, and some minor islands, which are de facto governed by the Republic of China)

Wiktionary · CC BY-SA

Etymology

Appears to be first attested in a memorial to the imperial government by official He Kai (何楷) in 1635: : Officially, no later than 1684 with the creation of Taiwan Prefecture (臺灣府). A phonetic transliteration of an ethnonym of a tribe in the southwest part of the island in the area of Anping, Tainan, southwest Taiwan, variously recorded in Dutch records as Tayouan or Tayowan or Taiouwang. A Dutch missionary referred to this group as Taiouwang no later than 1636. Other phonetic transliterations in Chinese characters included 大員 [1603], 大圓 [1617], 臺員, and 大灣 [circa 1624], as placenames initially referring to a sandbank peninsula that later silted up now wholly part of the island in the area of modern-day Anping District, Tainan that eventually became the name of the entire island. Possibly derived from Siraya. By surface analysis, 臺 /台 (tái, “terraced”) + 灣 /湾 (wān, “bay”).

Wiktionary · CC BY-SA

Stroke order

Components

Components from cjk-decomp · MIT

Characters

More examples & usage (AI)

Synonyms

Wiktionary · CC BY-SA

Derived terms

Wiktionary · CC BY-SA

Related words