wěi
adjective #17,744

Meanings

  1. 1 false
  2. 2 fake
  3. 3 forged
  4. 4 bogus
  5. 5 (prefix) pseudo-

Examples

Zhè shì yìzhāng wěichāo.
This is a counterfeit banknote.
Tā shì gè wěi qiúmí, qíshí gēnběn bù dǒng zúqiú.
He's a fake football fan — he doesn't actually understand football at all.

Tips

usage
is often used as a prefix: 科学 (pseudoscience), 伪装 (disguise), (puppet army). Compare with which is more colloquial.

Components

radical
rén
person (radical form of 人)
Left-side person radical — the indexing radical here. is defined as a human-made counterfeit ( + , literally 'what a person does'), so the radical isn't just decorative: it tells you the falseness is artificial, not natural. Same family: 仿 imitate, fake, steal.
phonetic
wéi
to do; to make
Right side supplies both sound (wéi → wěi with tone shift) and meaning. The classical reading is 人为 'made by people' — anything human-fabricated as opposed to 天真 natural truth. The phonetic doubles as a semantic, putting squarely in the artifice family.

Stroke Order

wěi