咎 (jiù): fault, blame

Meanings

1 fault, blame
2 calamity, misfortune
3 to blame

Characters

咎

jiù

fault, blame, calamity

Examples

这件事你难辞其咎。

Zhè jiàn shì nǐ nán cí qí jiù.

You can hardly evade blame for this.

既往不咎。

Jìwǎngbùjiù.

Don't dwell on past mistakes (lit. 'don't blame what's already passed').

Tips

history

咎 is the formal classical word for fault, blame, or the calamity that fault brings. It runs through ancient legal and historical texts. Today it survives mainly in fixed expressions like 既往不咎 ('let bygones be bygones') and 难辞其咎 ('cannot escape the blame').

usage

Rarely used alone in modern Chinese - almost always in compounds or set phrases. Worth knowing for chengyu literacy and reading classical texts.

Components

radical

口 kǒu

mouth (here a divination-pit symbol)

Bottom mouth radical - but here it does not mean speech. In archaic oracle-bone usage 口 in 咎 represented a pit or trap that misfortune fell into. It indexes the character as a fault-finding word, the formal classical term for "blame, calamity, transgression" used in legal and historical texts.

semantic

处 chǔ

to dwell; deal with (top semantic)

Top five strokes - historically a person plus the slow-walk graph 夊, sketching someone trudging hesitantly. The shape matches standalone 处 and gives 咎 its imagery of a person caught in a difficult situation, walking under a cloud. From this came "trouble, fault, blame."