哉
zāi

final exclamatory particle

哉 zāi
[classical exclamation]
Classical particle used at the end of a sentence to express exclamation or strong emotion, as in 大哉 dà​zāi or 呜呼哀哉 wū​hū'āi​zāi
[perfective/change of state]
In Wu dialects such as Shanghainese, used at the end of a sentence to show that an action is finished or a state has changed, equivalent to 了 le
[classical question]
Classical particle used at the end of a sentence to mark a question or rhetorical question, as in 何足道哉 hé​zú​dào​zāi
surname
A Chinese surname
to begin
In classical Chinese, to start or begin; equivalent to 始 shǐ

Cross-References

Same as

Frequency
Character
Written text
2,758th most common 13.7 per million
Movie subtitles
3,618th most common 1.20 per million appears in 0% of films
Word
Movie subtitles
1.49 per million appears in 0% of films
Written text
6.97 per million

Details
Strokes
9
Unicode
U+54C9

Sources
Frequency data
MTSU Chinese text computingSUBTLEX-CHBCC Corpus (BLCU)