noun HSK 2 #1,059

Meanings

  1. 1 night

Characters

Examples

Yè yǐjīng hěn shēn le.
It's already late at night.
Jīn yè yuèliang hěn měi.
The moon is beautiful tonight.
Nánjīng de yèjǐng hěn piàoliang.
Nanjing's night scenery is beautiful.

Tips

usage
is more literary than 晚上 (evening/night). It appears in compounds like 夜里 (at night), 半夜 (midnight), 深夜 (late night).

Components

radical
evening; dusk
Inner-right is the evening radical, a half-moon rising — the same picture as with one stroke removed. It is the indexing radical and supplies the core meaning: the evening moon. Combined with the lid above and the figure beside, the whole character stages a moonrise over a person at nightfall.
ideograph
tóu
lid; cap top
Top two strokes form the lid radical — a horizontal cap with a dot above. Here it works as a graphic 'roof' over the rest of the character, standing in for the canopy of night sky covering the world below. The lid is purely a positional marker, not a pictograph of a real object.
semantic
rén
person (left-form)
Inner-left is the side-form person radical, a standing figure. It places a human under the night sky — someone moving through, or resting in, the dark hours. The whole character originally depicted a person carrying the moon home through the dusk.

Stroke Order