亢 (kàng) · high; lofty

Meanings

1 high; lofty
2 haughty; arrogant
3 excessive; extreme

Characters

亢

kàng

high; haughty; throat (archaic)

Examples

HSK 5

他情绪高亢，整夜没合眼。

Tā qíngxù gāokàng, zhěngyè méi héyǎn.

He was so worked up he didn't sleep all night.

HSK 7-9

不卑不亢是处事的智慧。

Bùbēi-búkàng shì chǔshì de zhìhuì.

Neither servile nor arrogant - that is wisdom in dealing with people.

Tips

history

Oracle-bone 亢 was a pictograph of the human throat or neck - the front of the body drawn with a stretched-out neck. From 'neck stretched high' it came to mean lofty, then by extension haughty and excessive. The original anatomical sense survives only in classical texts.

usage

Mostly seen in compounds today: 高亢 (gāokàng, high-pitched / impassioned), 不卑不亢 (humble but not servile), and as the phonetic in 抗 (resist), 坑 (pit), 吭 (utter a sound), 航 (sail), 杭 (Hangzhou), 炕 (heated bed).

Components

radical

亠 tóu

lid; roof-cap

The 亠 cap on top is the indexing Kangxi radical for 亢. Originally 亢 depicted a standing person viewed from the front with neck raised high; the head-and-neck top was reanalyzed as the 亠 cap, anchoring the graph in the lid-radical lookup family.

semantic

几 jī

small table; legs frame

The bottom 几-shape represents the standing legs of the original front-view person pictograph. The raised-neck-and-standing-legs combination gives 亢 its 'high, lofty, haughty' meanings seen in 高亢 (loud and clear) and 不卑不亢 (neither humble nor haughty).