noun #68,663

Meanings

  1. 1 government office (in imperial times)
  2. 2 yamen

Examples

Gǔshíhou bǎixìng pà shàng yámen dǎ guānsi.
In old times, common people feared going to the yamen to file a lawsuit.
Tā yǐqián shì xiàn yá lǐ de xiǎo chāiyì.
He used to be a minor clerk in the county yamen.

Tips

usage
appears almost only in 衙门 (yamen), the office of a government official in imperial China. The word is now historical or used figuratively for a bureaucratic, hard-to-deal-with office.

Components

radical
xíng
to walk; a row
The element wraps around the outside as the indexing radical, its strokes split on the left and right of the inner part, framing the official compound one walks into.
phonetic
I; my
Inside sits , supplying the sound, shifted from wú to yá. It carries no meaning here.

Stroke Order