臆 (yì): chest; breast

Meanings

1 chest; breast
2 subjective; one's own conjecture

Characters

臆

yì

chest; subjective conjecture

Examples

不能光凭主观臆测就下结论。

Bùnéng guāng píng zhǔguān yì cè jiù xià jiélùn.

You can't draw conclusions just from subjective guesswork without evidence.

他的判断纯属臆断，毫无事实依据。

Tā de pànduàn chúnshǔ yì duàn, háowú shìshí yījù.

His judgment was purely subjective conjecture, with no facts to back it up.

Tips

usage

臆 originally meant the chest, then extended to inner feelings and, most commonly today, baseless subjective guessing: 臆测 (to conjecture) and 臆断 (an arbitrary judgment).

Components

radical

⺼ ròu

meat; flesh (radical form)

Left-side meat-flesh radical, the side form of 肉, visually like 月 but distinct. It marks 臆 as a body part, originally the chest, alongside 胸.

phonetic

意 yì

idea; thought (here phonetic-semantic)

Right side 意 (thought, idea) gives the sound yì exactly. Its meaning also feeds the modern sense: the chest as the seat of one's private thoughts and guesses.