染
rǎn HSK5

dye, infect, be contagious

染 rǎn
catch verb
to contract a disease or acquire negative habits

他因为交友不慎，染了一身坏毛病。

tā yīn​wèi jiāo​yǒu bù​shèn, rǎn le yī shēn huài máo​bìng.

Because of his poor choice of friends, he picked up a lot of bad habits.

contaminate verb
to soil, pollute, or affect something in a negative way

洁白的纸上染了一点淡墨迹。

jié​bái de zhǐ shàng rǎn le yī​diǎn dàn mò​jì.

The white paper was stained with a light ink mark.

dye verb
to apply color to cloth, hair, or other materials by soaking in a liquid

她把白布染成了蓝色。

tā bǎ bái bù rǎn​chéng le lán​sè.

She dyed the white cloth blue.

wash verb
to apply thin layers of color or ink in traditional painting

画家在山水画的背景中染了一层淡墨。

huà​jiā zài shān​shuǐ​huà de bèi​jǐng zhōng rǎn le yī céng dàn mò.

The painter applied a light ink wash to the background of the landscape painting.

Frequency
Character
Written text
1,141st most common 126.3 per million
Movie subtitles
1,207th most common 69.9 per million appears in 24% of films
Word
Movie subtitles
17.2 per million appears in 7% of films
Written text
23.8 per million

Details
HSK 2.0
Level 4
HSK 3.0
Level 5
Strokes
9
Unicode
U+67D3

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