pronoun #7,813

Meanings

  1. 1 I; me (literary/classical Chinese)

Examples

Wú rì sān xǐng wú shēn.
I examine myself three times a day. (Confucius)
Wú ài wú shī, wú gèng ài zhēnlǐ.
I love my teacher, but I love truth more. (Aristotle quote)

Tips

register
is the classical Chinese equivalent of . You'll see it in ancient texts, quotes from Confucius, and literary writing. In modern speech it sounds archaic or deliberately formal/poetic.
grammar
In classical Chinese, was typically used as subject ('I') while could be object ('me'). This distinction disappeared in modern Chinese where covers both.

Components

radical
kǒu
mouth
Bottom mouth radical — the indexing radical here. The mouth marks as a word of utterance: the one speaking, the speaker's own voice. This is the literary "I" used in Classical Chinese ( — "I daily examine myself three times" from the Analects).
phonetic
five (here phonetic)
Top supplies the sound — wǔ drifting to wú with a tone shift only. also lends a faint semantic flavour: "the central one of the five," matching as the literary first-person pronoun "I, my own self" — the centre of one's own reckoning.

Stroke Order