晕 (yūn): dizzy; giddy; lightheaded

Meanings

1 dizzy; giddy; lightheaded
2 to faint; to pass out; to lose consciousness
3 confused; bewildered

Characters

晕

yūn

dizzy; to faint

Examples

我头好晕。

Wǒ tóu hǎo yūn.

I feel so dizzy.

她晕过去了。

Tā yūn guòqù le.

She fainted.

站起来太快会晕。

Zhàn qǐlái tài kuài huì yūn.

You'll get dizzy if you stand up too fast.

Tips

usage

yūn is the everyday spoken reading — the dizzy, lightheaded, about-to-faint sense. Core compounds: 头晕 (dizzy), 晕倒 (to faint), 晕厥 (to lose consciousness), 晕头转向 (utterly disoriented). The colloquial interjection 我晕 ('I'm speechless / I can't even') is internet-slang dizzy: figurative overwhelm.

memory

日 (sun) + 军 (army) — an army marching under a blazing sun, soldiers getting dizzy. The original sense of the character was the hazy halo around the sun or moon (now read yùn); from 'optical halo' came 'the dizzy seeing-stars feeling' for yūn.

Components

radical

日 rì

sun; day

Top sun radical (Kangxi #72) — the indexing radical. The original sense of 晕 was a 'halo around the sun or moon' — that hazy ring you see in misty conditions. From 'optical halo' came 'dizzy, faint, see stars,' the modern colloquial senses (晕车 carsick, 我晕了 I'm dizzy/whoa). Same radical groups 时, 明, 早, 晚.

phonetic

军 jūn

army; military

Bottom phonetic 军 — supplies the sound, shifting to yūn/yùn through the velar-to-zero shift typical of medieval Mandarin. Same phonetic in 运 (transport), 浑 (muddy), 挥 (wave), 辉 (shine). Recognising 军 below or beside often signals a yūn/yùn/huī reading.