yán
adjective #14,802

Meanings

  1. 1 beautiful
  2. 2 gorgeous

Examples

HSK 3
Chūntiān bǎihuā zhēng yán.
In spring, hundreds of flowers compete in beauty.
HSK 3
Yán shì yī gè hěn shòu huānyíng de nǚhái míngzi.
Yan is a very popular name for girls.

Tips

usage
is literary and rarely used alone in modern speech. It appears in set phrases like 百花争妍 (flowers competing in beauty) and 妍媸 (beautiful and ugly). Very popular as a character in girls' names.
memory
The character combines (woman) and (open/bloom) - a woman in full bloom, radiantly beautiful.

Components

radical
woman; female
Left woman radical - pictograph of a person kneeling with arms folded, a classical pose. The indexing radical: means beautiful, gorgeous, gracefulness, almost exclusively of women in classical use (妍蚩 'beauty vs ugliness'). Same family of feminine-aesthetic words: charming, graceful, alluring.
phonetic
kāi
to open
Right supplies the sound - historically the phonetic was (two stacked side by side), which through palatalisation gives yán. Modern is the post-reform shape of that . Pure phonetic role; 's 'open' meaning doesn't contribute, though 'opening flower' is an easy folk-mnemonic for beauty.

Stroke Order

yán