字
zì HSK1

letter

字 zì
character noun
written symbol, letter, or word

这个字怎么读？

zhè gè zì zěn​me dú?

How is this character pronounced?

courtesy name noun
style name traditionally given to males at age 20 in dynastic China

李白，字太白。

Lǐ Bái, zì Tài​bái.

Li Bai's courtesy name was Taibai.

mark or brand noun
to brand or mark (an animal) with a symbol or sign for identification.

农场主在牛背上烙了一个字作为记号。

nóng​chǎng​zhǔ zài niú​bèi shàng lào le yī gè zì zuò​wéi jì​hao.

The farmer branded a character onto the cow's back as a mark.

Cross-References

Classifier

Frequency
Character
Written text
393rd most common 559.3 per million
Movie subtitles
323rd most common 485.5 per million appears in 86% of films
Word
Movie subtitles
76.7 per million appears in 26% of films
Written text
180.0 per million

Details
HSK 2.0
Level 1
HSK 3.0
Level 1
Strokes
6
Unicode
U+5B57

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