夜深

yèshēn
adjective #31,308

Meanings

  1. 1 late at night
  2. 2 deep into the night
  3. 3 the night being deep/advanced

Examples

Yè shēn le, kuài qù shuìjiào ba.
It's late — go to bed.
Yè shēn rén jìng, tā hái zài xiězuò.
Deep in the silent night, he was still writing.

Tips

usage
夜深 most often appears in two patterns: 夜深 ("it's getting late") as a casual warning to go to bed, and the four-character set phrase 夜深人静 ("the night is deep, people are still") — a near-universal scene-setting line in Chinese narrative for late-night solitude.
memory
literally means "deep." Chinese conceptualizes time the way we conceptualize a body of water: you go into the night the way you go deep into a lake. English's "deep into the night" works the same way.

Stroke Order

shēn