牡
Meanings
CC-CEDICT
- 1.(of a bird, animal or plant) male
- 2.key
- 3.hills
CC-CEDICT · CC BY-SA
Wiktionary
- 1.male genitals
- 2.bolt of door
- 3.hill; hump
- 4.used in 牡蠣／牡蛎 (mǔlì, “oyster”)
Wiktionary · CC BY-SA
Etymology
Ideogrammic compound (會意 /会意): 牛 (“cattle”) + 丄. Various explanations exist, some propose 丄 (here unrelated to 上) depicts a penis to represent “male”. Later 丄 came to be written 土. See also the etymology of this character. Austroasiatic (Schuessler, 2007). Compare Proto-Mon-Khmer *ɟm(oo)l (“male”) (whence Khmer ឈ្មោល (chmool, “to be male”)), Old Mon jmūr ~ jmur (“male (elephant)”), Proto-Waic *(k)mɔj (“(wild) ox; buffalo”), Proto-Vietic *mɔːlʔ (“person; human being”) (whence Vietnamese mọi (“savage; barbarian”), Muong mõl (“human being”)). An oracle bone graph for this word shows a vertical stick on a horizontal ground, possibly because it had been intended for an obsolete homophone cognate with Proto-Vietic *c-mɔːlʔ (“digging stick”), which alongside "male" may derive from a stem represented in Old Khmer cval (“to enter; to penetrate; (of animals) to copulate”), Khmu [script needed] (cmɔɔl, “to plant (rice) with a digging stick”), [script needed] (crmɔɔl, “digging stick”) (ibid.; Ferlus, 1987). Schuessler (2007) further proposes a relationship with 畝 (OC *mɯʔ, “cropland; mu (a Chinese measuring unit for area)”) (ibid.); see there for more.
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Stroke order
Components
Components from cjk-decomp · MIT
Example sentences
你能生吃牡蠣嗎？
Can you eat raw oysters?
我後悔吃了那些牡蠣。
I regret eating those oysters.
Sentences from Tatoeba · CC-BY 2.0 FR
More examples & usage (AI)
Synonyms
Antonyms
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Derived terms
Wiktionary · CC BY-SA