血

Meanings

Etymology

Ideogrammic compound (會意 /会意): 一 (“drop of blood”) + 皿 (“container”) - a drop of blood inside a chalice for sacrificial uses. In the oracle bone script, the character was used to refer to killing animals to obtain blood to sacrifice to ancestors: From Proto-Sino-Tibetan *s-hjwəj-t (“blood”) (STEDT; Schuessler, 2007). Baxter and Sagart (2014) reconstruct the Old Chinese as *m̥ˤik to account for word-family connections with 脈 (OC *C.mˤ[i]k, “vein”), 衊 (OC *mˤi[k], “defiled blood”) as well as its use as a phonetic component in 侐 (OC *m̥(r)ik, “still; quiet”), which is in the same word family as 宓 (OC *mi[k], “quiet; silent”) (Sagart, 1999b; Baxter and Sagart, 2017). Sagart (1999b) argues that this word is not genetically related to the Tibeto-Burman form with *s-hjw-, but that this word has been borrowed into Tibeto-Burman. Schuessler (2019) critiques Sagart (1999b)'s proposal that Tibeto-Burman languages all over Southeast Asia and the Himalayas in early dynastic time would and could borrow Chinese words, and Baxter and Sagart (2014)'s reconstruction 血 (OC *m̥ˤik) as resulting from "phonetic over-interpretation of graphs" and confusing etymological link with mental association between "blood" and "vein".

Wiktionary · CC BY-SA

Stroke order

Components

Components from cjk-decomp · MIT

Example sentences

• 那看著像血。

  That looks like blood.

• 到处都是血。

  Blood was everywhere.

• 墙上还是有血。

  There's still blood on the wall.

• 墙上沾满了血。

  The walls are covered with blood.

• 她看见血就晕了。

  She fainted when she saw blood.

• 讓我量量你的血壓。

  Let me take your blood pressure.

Sentences from Tatoeba · CC-BY 2.0 FR

More examples & usage (AI)

Synonyms

Wiktionary · CC BY-SA

Derived terms

Wiktionary · CC BY-SA

Related words