癌
Meanings
CC-CEDICT
- 1.cancer; (esp.) carcinoma
CC-CEDICT · CC BY-SA
Wiktionary
- 1.cancer; carcinoma
Wiktionary · CC BY-SA
Etymology
Phono-semantic compound (形聲 /形声, ái, yán): semantic 疒 (“disease”) + phonetic 嵒 (yán, “rock”); 嵒 is a variant of 岩. From 岩 (yán, “cliff; rock, stone”), since some cancers present as lumps or outgrowths on the body. In Mandarin, this character used to be pronounced identically as 岩 (yán). Its pronunciation was changed to ái in December 1962 to avoid the homophony between 癌 (yán, “cancer”) and 炎 (yán, “inflammation”) (compare 肺炎 (fèiyán, “pneumonia”) and 肺癌 (fèi'ái, “lung cancer”)). The new pronunciation ái stems from dialectal pronunciations of 岩 (“rock; cliff”) /ŋai/, influenced by 崖 (yá, yái, “cliff”).
Wiktionary · CC BY-SA
Stroke order
Components
Components from cjk-decomp · MIT
Example sentences
紫外線可導致皮膚癌。
Ultraviolet rays can cause skin cancer.
癌細胞已經擴散到她的胃。
The cancer has spread to her stomach.
Sentences from Tatoeba · CC-BY 2.0 FR
More examples & usage (AI)
Derived terms
Wiktionary · CC BY-SA