涅
niè

blacken

涅 niè
alunite noun
a mineral or black soil used in ancient times as a black dye

古人常采涅石作为黑色染料。

gǔ​rén cháng cǎi niè shí zuò​wéi hēi​sè rǎn​liào.

Ancient people often used alum shale as a black dye.

dye black verb
to dye something black

工匠们用这种天然矿物将白布涅成深黑色。

gōng​jiàng men yòng zhè zhǒng tiān​rán kuàng​wù jiāng bái​bù niè chéng shēn hēi sè.

The craftsmen used this natural mineral to dye the white cloth a deep black.

Frequency
Character
Written text
2,343rd most common 23.8 per million
Movie subtitles
2,702nd most common 6.00 per million appears in 2% of films
Word
Movie subtitles
2.50 per million appears in 1% of films
Written text
5.43 per million

Details
Strokes
10
Unicode
U+6D85

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