嗣 (sì): heir

Meanings

1 heir
2 successor
3 to inherit
4 to continue (a tradition)

Characters

嗣

sì

heir; to succeed; to inherit

Examples

他没有子嗣，财产无人继承。

Tā méiyǒu zǐ sì, cáichǎn wúrén jìchéng.

He had no heirs, and his estate had no one to inherit it.

古代帝王非常重视立嗣问题。

Gǔdài dìwáng fēicháng zhòngshì lì sì wèntí.

Ancient emperors placed great importance on the matter of establishing an heir.

Tips

register

嗣 is a classical/literary term rarely used in everyday modern speech. It most commonly appears in historical texts, legal documents about inheritance, or compound words like 子嗣 (heirs/offspring).

memory

The character combines 司 (to manage/oversee) and 冊 (records/scrolls) — the one who manages the family records is the designated heir.

Components

radical

口 kǒu

mouth

Mouth radical sits in the upper left as the indexing radical — here it stands for the spoken proclamation by which an heir is named. In the ancestor-hall ritual that gave 嗣 its meaning, the head of the family declared the successor aloud, and 口 marks that declaration.

semantic

冊 cè

register; volume

Middle 冊 — a pictograph of bound bamboo slips, the ancient form of a written register. In 嗣 it represents the official record of lineage, the document that fixes who inherits. The combination of mouth and register reads as 'spoken-and-written succession.'

phonetic

司 sī

to manage; to oversee (here phonetic + semantic)

Right 司 supplies the sound — sī shifting to sì with a tone change — and adds meaning: 司 means 'to take charge of, to administer.' The full character paints succession as a managed handover, with the heir formally entrusted to oversee the family line.