吴 (Wú): Wu (Chinese surname)

Meanings

1 Wu (Chinese surname)
2 Wu (ancient state in the Yangtze Delta region)

Characters

吴

Wú

Wu (surname); ancient state name

Examples

吴老师教我们数学。

Wú lǎoshī jiāo wǒmen shùxué.

Teacher Wu teaches us math.

吴是中国最常见的姓之一。

Wú shì Zhōngguó zuì chángjiàn de xìng zhīyī.

Wu is one of the most common surnames in China.

Tips

culture

吴 is the 9th most common Chinese surname (~28 million people). It's associated with the Wu region (modern Jiangsu/Zhejiang) and the Wu dialect group including Shanghainese. The ancient Wu Kingdom was one of the Three Kingdoms (三国).

Components

radical

口 kǒu

mouth

Top mouth radical — pictograph of an open mouth, the small square shape. The indexing radical, marking 吴 in the speech/sound family: the original graph showed a person with head tilted, mouth open in song or shout. From that 'loud-voiced figure' came both the surname Wu and the name of the southern state of Wu (Three Kingdoms).

semantic

天 tiān

sky; heaven

Bottom 天 — pictograph of a person 大 with a horizontal stroke marking the head, pointing skyward. In 吴 this bottom is the modern regularised form; historically it was a stretched figure 夨 (tilted head). The combined picture: a person with head thrown back, shouting up at the sky — the loud / boastful flavour behind the name 吴.