祸 (huò): disaster

Meanings

1 disaster
2 misfortune
3 calamity

Characters

祸

huò

disaster; misfortune

Examples

祸从口出。

Huò cóng kǒu chū.

Disaster comes from the mouth. (Loose lips sink ships.)

这场祸事造成了很大的损失。

Zhè chǎng huò shì zàochéng le hěn dà de sǔnshī.

This calamity caused great losses.

他惹了大祸。

Tā rě le dàhuò.

He caused big trouble.

Tips

usage

祸 often appears in classical sayings and idioms: 祸从口出 (trouble comes from careless talk), 祸不单行 (misfortunes never come singly), 惹祸 (to cause trouble). Opposite of 福 (fú, blessing).

culture

祸福相依 (huòfú xiāngyī, misfortune and fortune depend on each other) reflects the Daoist idea that good and bad are intertwined, from the Laozi: 祸兮福之所倚，福兮祸之所伏.

Components

radical

礻 shì

altar; spirit (radical form of 示)

Left indexing altar radical 礻 — left-side variant of 示, the spirit/ancestor radical. Pictures an altar where offerings were made to the gods. Anchors 祸 in the divine-affairs family alongside 神 (deity), 福 (blessing), 礼 (ritual), 祝 (pray). Disasters in classical thought came from the spirit world.

phonetic

呙 guō

crooked mouth (here phonetic)

Right 呙 supplies the sound (guō → huò through Old Chinese g/h alternation). Same phonetic family: 锅 (pot), 过 (cross), 涡 (eddy), 窝 (nest), 蜗 (snail). 呙 itself depicts a twisted mouth — a faint flavor of "things gone crooked," reinforcing the disaster meaning.