无 (wú): not to have

Meanings

1 not to have
2 no
3 none
4 not
5 to lack
6 un-
7 -less

Characters

无

wú

without; none; not have

Examples

他无话可说。

Tā wúhuàkěshuō.

He had nothing to say.

无论如何我都支持你。

Wúlùnrúhé wǒ dōu zhīchí nǐ.

I'll support you no matter what.

这里无人知道答案。

Zhèlǐ wúrén zhīdào dá'àn.

Nobody here knows the answer.

Tips

register

无 is the literary/formal equivalent of 没有. Newspapers, signs, contracts, and set phrases use 无; everyday speech uses 没有. Saying 我无钱 in a casual chat sounds wooden — use 我没钱 instead.

grammar

Lives as a bound un-/-less prefix in fixed compounds: 无线 (wireless), 无限 (limitless), 无法 (unable to), 无聊 (boring), 无关 (unrelated). Treat each compound as a unit rather than building new 无 + X coinages.

register

Rare second reading mó appears in exactly one fossilized Buddhist invocation: 南无 (Sanskrit namo, 'I take refuge in'), as in 南无阿弥陀佛. You will only hear it in temples or chanting recordings — no other word uses this reading, so it doesn't warrant a separate dictionary entry. Default to wú everywhere else.

Components

ideograph

无 wú

not have; without

Four-stroke silhouette preserving no productive components — a self-contained abstract shape that carries the negation meaning. Already attested in pre-Qin texts as a variant of 無, adopted as the official 1956 simplification. Historically traditional 無 pictured a dancer holding tassels, borrowed phonetically for negation. Indexed under Kangxi #71 无 (the radical it heads); the radical isn't visibly exposed as a sub-component because the whole glyph IS the radical.

Radical

Not Have Kangxi #71

The simplified form of 無, originally a pictograph of a dancer holding tassels — borrowed early to write the negation 'not have'. As an indexing radical it organizes characters using the variant form 旡 (a person looking back, choking) such as 既 (already) and 暨 (and / up to).

Forms

无 wú

Default 1 characters

旡 jì

Right 1 characters