先 Definitions — Dong Chinese Dictionary

xiān HSK1

first

先 xiān

first adverb: beforehand; first; earlier; 你先请，我随后就到。

nǐ xiān qǐng, wǒ suíhòu jiù dào.

After you; I'll follow shortly.

for now adverb: for the time being; for now; 这件事咱们先放一放。

zhè jiàn shì zánmen xiān fàng yī fàng.

Let's put this matter aside for the moment.

at first adverb: at first; originally; 他先是不肯，后来还是答应了。

tā xiān shì bù kěn, hòulái háishi dāying le.

At first he refused, but later he agreed.

late noun: prefix referring to deceased relatives older than oneself; 先父生前很喜欢读书。

xiān fù shēngqián hěn xǐhuan dúshū.

My late father loved reading when he was alive.

Frequency

Character

Written text: 188th most common 1088.5 per million
Movie subtitles: 115th most common 1521.2 per million appears in 98% of films

Word

Movie subtitles: 478.7 per million appears in 83% of films
Written text: 293.6 per million

Details

HSK 2.0: Level 1
HSK 3.0: Level 1
Strokes: 6
Unicode: U+5148

Sources

Definitions: CC-CEDICT
Frequency data: MTSU Chinese text computing SUBTLEX-CH BCC Corpus (BLCU)