夫

fū
noun #2,166

Meanings

  1. 1 husband; man
  2. 2 manual worker

Examples

HSK 2
Tā de zhàngfu hěn gāo.
Her husband is very tall.
HSK 7-9
Fūqī liǎ hěn ēn'ài.
The married couple are very loving.

Tips

memory
夫 is a person (大) with a hairpin on top, an adult man. Compounds: 丈夫 (husband), 夫人 (madam), 功夫 (kung fu).
history
In classical Chinese 夫 has a second reading fú used as a grammatical particle: a demonstrative ('this, that'), an opening word that introduces a statement, or an exclamatory sentence-final, as in Confucius' 逝者如斯夫 ('so it passes on'). Modern Chinese keeps only the fū 'man, husband' reading.

Components

radical
大 dà
person standing
An adult figure with outstretched arms; the bottom three strokes are 大 verbatim, the body the hairpin sits above.
ideograph
一 yī
hairpin
Top horizontal, the hairpin tying up the hair. In ancient China this marked the capping rite (冠礼) at age twenty, when a boy became a man.

Stroke Order

夫 fū