妾
qiè

concubine

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approved by Peter Olson · Feb 19, 2022, 06:23 PM · Reviewed by Peter Olson on Feb 19, 2022, 06:23 PM

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Depicts a woman (女) with a damaged reputation (䇂 is a pictograph of a tool used to tattoo the face of criminals as punishment).

Components

䇂
䇂 Iconic component
qiān sickle, curved blade
Change in form
Due to historical stylistic changes, this component is less similar to 䇂 than it was in ancient scripts.
女
女 Iconic component
nǚ, nü woman

Character Evolution

Oracle form
Oracle Bone ~1250-1000 BC
Oracle form
Oracle Bone ~1250-1000 BC
Bronze form
Bronze Late Western Zhou ~800 BC
Seal form
Seal Warring States (Chu) 475-221 BC
Seal form
Seal Shuowen ~100 AD
Clerical form
Clerical Qin 221-206 BC
Clerical form
Clerical Western Han 202 BC-9 AD
Clerical form
Clerical Western Han 202 BC-9 AD
Clerical form
Clerical Eastern Han 25-220 AD
Regular Modern

Historical Pronunciations

Middle ChineseOld ChineseGloss
Baxter-Sagarttshjep[tsʰ]ap concubine

說文解字

《說文》：“妾，有辠女子，給事之得接於君者。从，从女。《春秋》云：‘女為人妾，妾不娉也。’”

Sources

Character origin
漢語多功能字庫
Readings & variants
Unicode
Historical pronunciations
Baxter-Sagart
Historical images
Academia Sinica
Etymology
Shuowen Jiezi (說文解字)