抑
yì HSK7

press down

抑 yì
or conjunction
a conjunction used to indicate an alternative, typically in formal or literary contexts

这是他的个人意愿，抑或是受了别人的指使？

zhè shì tā de gè​rén yì​yuàn, yì huò shì shòu le bié​ren de zhǐ​shǐ?

Is this his own personal will, or was he put up to it by someone else?

restrain verb
to suppress, restrict, or keep down

写这篇文章时，他采用了欲扬先抑的手法。

xiě zhè piān wén​zhāng shí, tā cǎi​yòng le yù yáng xiān yì de shǒu​fǎ.

In writing this article, he used the technique of initial suppression followed by praise.

Frequency
Character
Written text
1,748th most common 50.2 per million
Movie subtitles
1,937th most common 21.5 per million appears in 11% of films
Word
Movie subtitles
1.19 per million appears in 1% of films
Written text
7.79 per million

Details
HSK 2.0
Level 6
HSK 3.0
Level 7
Strokes
7
Unicode
U+6291

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