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

HSK 1

站起来太快会晕。

Zhàn qǐlái tài kuài huì yūn.

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

HSK 2

她晕过去了。

Tā yūn guòqù le.

She fainted.

HSK 6

头晕是许多疾病的常见症状。

Tóuyūn shì xǔduō jíbìng de chángjiàn zhèngzhuàng.

Dizziness is a common symptom of many illnesses.

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.