焚 (fén): to burn

Meanings

1 to burn
2 to set fire to

Characters

焚

fén

to burn

Examples

他焚毁了所有的信件。

Tā fénhuǐ le suǒyǒu de xìnjiàn.

He burned all the letters.

寺庙里有人焚香祈福。

Sìmiào lǐ yǒurén fénxiāng qífú.

People burn incense and pray for blessings in the temple.

Tips

register

焚 is literary and formal. In everyday speech, 烧 (shāo) is the common word for 'burn'. 焚 appears in set phrases like 焚烧 (fénshāo), 焚毁 (fénhuǐ), and 焚香 (fénxiāng).

history

Famous in the phrase 焚书坑儒 (fénshū kēngrú) — 'burning books and burying scholars alive' — referring to Qin Shi Huang's suppression of intellectual thought.

Components

radical

火 huǒ

fire

火 sits at the base in its full standalone form (not reduced to 灬) and serves as the indexing radical. The vertical stacking forest-over-fire is unusually direct: you can read the meaning straight off the picture. Sibling radicals 烧, 燃, 烫 share the family of burning verbs.

semantic

林 lín

forest; woods

林 (two trees side by side) sits on top — a literal forest. The whole graph is a transparent compound ideograph: forest above, fire below = burning the woods. Oracle-bone records show 焚 used for hunters setting bush-fires to drive game, the original meaning surviving in 焚书 (book-burning).