ào
adjective #2,248

Meanings

  1. 1 profound
  2. 2 mysterious
  3. 3 abbr. for Olympics (奥运)

Examples

Zhège dàolǐ hěn àomiào.
This principle is very profound.
Àoyùnhuì sì nián yī jiè.
The Olympics are held every four years.

Tips

usage
on its own is rarely used in everyday speech. It most commonly appears as an abbreviation for 奥运 (Olympics) or in words like 奥秘 (mystery) and 奥妙 (subtle, profound).

Components

radical
big; person with arms wide
Bottom big — the indexing radical here. Pictures a person standing with arms outstretched. Beneath the inner-recess imagery above, the figure of a person occupies the space, completing the image of someone deep in a sacred chamber. Drives the abstract sense of "deep, profound, mysterious."
semantic
mián
roof; house (radical form)
Top roof — pictures the eaves of a covered building. The original depicted the south-west corner of an ancient hall, the deepest and most sacred recess where ancestral offerings were placed. The roof anchors this architectural meaning: a hidden interior space.
semantic
rice; grain
Middle -shape — historically a hand-and-grain element representing the ritual offerings placed in the inner corner of the hall. In modern shape it has regularized to the rice graph. Together with the roof above, the image is "grain offerings under cover" — the inner sacred recess.

Stroke Order

ào