verb #14,228

Meanings

  1. 1 to admire
  2. 2 to yearn for

Examples

Tā yīzhí mù míng xiǎng qù nà jiā cāntīng.
He has long admired that restaurant's reputation and wanted to go.
Hěnduō rén dōu yǎngmù tā de cáihuá.
Many people admire her talent.

Tips

usage
is literary on its own. In modern Chinese it usually appears in compounds: 羡慕 (envy), 仰慕 (look up to), 爱慕 (adore), (attracted by fame).

Components

radical
xīn
heart (bottom-form radical of 心)
Bottom heart radical ⺗ — the four-stroke form takes when it sits beneath a character (compare with the 4-dot form). It indexes in the mental-emotional family alongside think, long for, worry. The heart on the bottom marks inward feeling rather than outward act — is the inward yearning of longing.
phonetic
do not; sunset (here phonetic)
Top supplies the sound: mò drifting to mù with the regular vowel shift. Same phonetic powers mold, touch, membrane, grave, dusk. itself depicts the sun () sinking into grass (...) — the original graph for 'sunset.' Faintly semantic too: is the longing felt as evening falls, the dusk-pang of missing someone.

Stroke Order