甫 (fǔ): barely

Meanings

1 barely
2 just
3 just now (classical/literary)

Characters

甫

fǔ

just; barely; only just (literary)

Examples

他甫一开口，全场顿时安静下来。

Tā fǔ yī kāikǒu, quánchǎng dùnshí ānjìng xiàlai.

The moment he opened his mouth, the whole room immediately fell silent.

战事甫定，百姓开始重建家园。

Zhànshì fǔ dìng, bǎixìng kāishǐ chóngjiàn jiāyuán.

No sooner had the fighting ended than the people began to rebuild their homes.

Tips

register

甫 is a classical and literary adverb, rarely used in spoken modern Chinese. It is common in written news, formal essays, and literary texts, particularly in Taiwan and Hong Kong. It corresponds to 刚 (gāng) or 刚刚 in everyday speech.

Components

radical

用 yòng

use; vessel

The 用-shaped lower body is the indexing Kangxi radical for 甫. Originally 甫 depicted a young plant sprouting in a field; the graph was reanalyzed so its body matched 用, placing 甫 in the use-radical lookup family despite no original tool-or-vessel meaning.

ideograph

十 shí

ten; cross

Top crossing stroke functions as a compressed cap marker above the main body — a graphic residue with no productive sub-structure. Historically the sprout emerging at the top of the original seedling pictograph (the older 屮 sprout shape), now collapsed into this single horizontal cap.