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Chén

Meanings

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Chén
  1. 1.surname Chen
chén
  1. 1.state official or subject in dynastic China
  2. 2.I, your servant (used in addressing the sovereign)
  3. 3.Kangxi radical 131

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Wiktionary

  1. 1.slave; servant; captive
  2. 2.minister; statesman; official (in feudal society)
  3. 3.subjects of a monarch
  4. 4.to make a subject
  5. 5.I, me; your servant (humble pronoun, especially when speaking to a monarch)
  6. 6.a surname
  7. 7.a respelling of the English patronymic son

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Etymology

Pictogram (象形) – A vertical eye of a man looking downwards. As an individual character it has taken on the meanings “slave; servant; minister”, while the meaning relating to eyes appears when used as a radical, such as in 臨 (“to look down at”) and 監 (“to inspect”). Compare 目. Unrelated to 𦣞. In Old Chinese, nominalization with nasal suffix of the verb 視 (OC *ɡljilʔ, *ɡljils, *ɢljils, “to watch”), hence literally "watcher; supervisor" (Schuessler 2007). In the archaic language of the Shang oracle bones (late second millennium BCE), this word referred to "royal officers, many of whose individual names were recorded, who served in the royal court, received the king's orders to launch military expeditions and other tasks, and received royal gifts" (Keightley 2012).

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Stroke order

Components

Components from cjk-decomp · MIT

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Synonyms

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Derived terms

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