tǎng
adjective

Meanings

  1. 1 (classical) free and unconventional; unrestrained
  2. 2 (classical) if; should it happen that

Examples

Tā tì tǎng bùjī, bù jū yú shìsú.
He was free-spirited and unrestrained, caring nothing for worldly rules.

Tips

history
is not used independently in modern Chinese. Its main survival is (dashing and unconventional). It also had a classical 'if' sense, the same role now carried by , which shares the phonetic.
register
Archaic and literary only, alive mainly inside the fixed compound, not in everyday speech.

Components

radical
rén
person
is the person radical in left-side form. It marks as describing a person's free, unbound temperament.
phonetic
dǎng
party; clique
supplies the sound, drifted to tǎng. The same phonetic appears in (if) and (to trickle).

Stroke Order

tǎng