Skip to content
Inkstone
Sign in

niáng
HSK 7freq #2131

Meanings

CC-CEDICT

niáng
  1. 1.variant of 娘[niáng]
niáng
  1. 1.mother
  2. 2.young lady
  3. 3.(coll.) effeminate

CC-CEDICT · CC BY-SA

Wiktionary

  1. 1.woman, especially a young girl
  2. 2.mother; ma
  3. 3.wife of a particular person
  4. 4.elderly lady
  5. 5."The Lady" (an epithet of the Fujianese sea goddess Mazu (媽祖 /妈祖 (Māzǔ))
  6. 6.girly; feminine; effeminate
  7. 7.(Chinese linguistics) the Middle Chinese initial of 娘 (MC nrjang)
  8. 8.old-fashioned

Wiktionary · CC BY-SA

Etymology

Phono-semantic compound (形聲 /形声, OC *naŋ): semantic 女 + phonetic 良 (OC *raŋ). Not attested in pre-Tang texts. It may ultimately have been a fusion of 女郎 (MC nrjoX lang, “lady”) (Coblin, 1994). Alternatively, from 女 (OC *naʔ, “woman”) with an attached suffix *-ŋ also found in 卬 (OC *ŋaːŋ, *ŋaŋʔ, “I for my part”) as against 我 (OC *ŋaːlʔ, “I”) (Sagart, 1999: 134). However, evidence for this suffix is sparse; Sagart only adduces these two pairs of words. As yet another suggestion, it may be a loan from Old Turkic anaŋ (“your mother”), from Proto-Turkic *ana ~ *eńe (“mother”) (whence Turkish ana and Uyghur ئانا (ana)) and *-iŋ (“second person singular possessive suffix”), (Vovin and McCraw, 2011).

Wiktionary · CC BY-SA

Stroke order

Components

Components from cjk-decomp · MIT

More examples & usage (AI)

Synonyms

Wiktionary · CC BY-SA

Derived terms

Wiktionary · CC BY-SA

Related words