号 (háo) · to roar

Meanings

1 to roar
2 to cry loudly; to wail
3 to howl (of wind or animals)

Characters

号

háo

to roar

Examples

HSK 5

北风怒号。

Běifēng nù háo.

The north wind howls furiously.

HSK 5

孩子饿得直号。

Háizi è de zhí háo.

The child wailed nonstop from hunger.

HSK 7-9

她听到噩耗，放声大号。

Tā tīngdào èhào, fàngshēng dà háo.

She heard the terrible news and wailed at the top of her voice.

Tips

register

The 号 reading is literary and survives mainly in fixed compounds: 号叫 (to howl), 号哭 (to wail), 号啕大哭 (to bawl uncontrollably), 哀号 (to wail in grief), and the classical line 北风怒号 (the north wind howls in rage). In everyday spoken Chinese, ordinary crying uses 哭 rather than 号.

memory

Hear the rising tone of 号 as the rising pitch of a wail: the voice climbs as the cry stretches out. The 4th-tone 号 is the dry administrative sense (number, name, mark) - flat and final, like stamping a label. Rising tone = rising voice in grief; falling tone = signed and filed.

Components

radical

口 kǒu

mouth

Top 口 - the indexing radical (Kangxi #30), an open mouth in the act of crying out. The 号 reading preserves the original sense: a loud vocal cry. Same vocal family as 吼 (roar), 嚎 (howl, the later phonosemantic build-out of this same cry), 啕 (bawl, only used with 号).

phonetic

丂 kǎo

breath rising; obstructed exhalation

Bottom 丂 - an old graph of breath forced upward against an obstruction, both the phonetic and the picture of the cry itself. Combined with the mouth above, the character pictures a voice straining out of the throat - the literal wail that this 号 reading keeps. The later hào reading (number, mark, name) is a derived extension from the same calling-out core.