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忐忑

tǎn

Meanings

CC-CEDICT

tǎn
  1. 1.apprehensive; on edge

CC-CEDICT · CC BY-SA

Wiktionary

  1. 1.perturbed; nervous; uneasy; fidgety
  2. 2.sincere

Wiktionary · CC BY-SA

Etymology

Ideogrammic compound (會意 /会意), from 上 (“up”), 下 (“down”) and 心 (“heart”). Unknown. Earliest attestation was in the Song dynasty as 憳忒 in Jiyun. It is a word where the onsets are shared between the syllables (雙聲詞), likely reduplicative and/or onomatopoeic in origin. Compare 忒忒 (tètè, “throbbing (abnormally)”) and 突突 (tūtū, “palpitating”) (Ma, 2007), as well as Vietnamese thấp thỏm, nhấp nhỏm (“uneasy, fidgety”).

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