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

北风怒号。

Běifēng nù háo.

The north wind howls furiously.

孩子饿得直号。

Háizi è de zhí háo.

The child wailed nonstop from hunger.

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.