mín
noun #36,249

Meanings

  1. 1 (literary) the heavens, the sky
  2. 2 specifically the autumn sky
  3. 3 (modern) frequently used as a personal-name character

Examples

Gǔrén chēng qiūtiān de tiānkōng wéi mín tiān.
The ancients called the autumn sky 'mintian' (the autumn heavens).
Tā gěi érzi qǔmíng jiào Zǐ mín.
He named his son Zimin.

Tips

history
In the 《》 (Erya, the earliest Chinese dictionary), each season has its own word for 'sky': 苍天 (spring = blue heaven), (summer = vast heaven), (autumn = compassionate heaven), 为上 (winter = high heaven). is the autumn-specific term, often glossed as 'merciful' because of harvest abundance.
usage
Outside of classical and poetic registers, you'll encounter mainly in given names (it carries an elegant, cosmic feel) and in the K-pop world via the Korean given-name reading 'Min' (e.g. SHINee's / Minho).

Components

semantic
sun; day
Top — the sun, pictograph of a disc with a central mark. Here it stands for the bright daytime sky overhead, anchoring in the celestial family with (sunrise), (vast sky), (clear weather).
phonetic
wén
pattern; writing
Bottom — originally a person with patterned chest tattoos, here mainly a phonetic prop: wén → mín through onset shift. A faint cultural overtone too — the autumn sky in classical poetry is the most 'patterned' of the four seasons' heavens, streaked with cloud and migrating birds.

No stroke data for ; the glyph shown is your device font, so component strokes can't be highlighted.

Stroke Order

mín