yōu
adverb #14,353

Meanings

  1. 1 distant; far
  2. 2 (literary) adverbial prefix

Examples

Zhè shì yī jiàn xìngmìng yōu guān de dàshì.
This is a matter of life and death.
Lìhài yōu guān, bùnéng diàoyǐqīngxīn.
The stakes are high — we must not take it lightly.

Tips

usage
is a classical Chinese word that almost exclusively appears in the compound (yōuguān, to be of vital concern) in modern usage: 性命 (a matter of life and death), 利害 (of vital interest), 存亡攸关 (a question of survival).

Components

radical
tap; strike (radical form)
Right rap radical — a hand holding a stick, here directing the washing. Anchors in the family of action verbs: teach, change, govern. The combined scene gave its original 'flowing along' sense, which abstracted into the literary 'distant' and the adverbial-prefix use seen in classical texts.
semantic
rén
person (radical form of 人)
Left person radical — the side-form of , a standing human figure. Pictures the subject of the action: someone being washed. Pair it with the central water-stroke and the right hand-with-stick and the scene becomes a person bathed by water under direction.
ideograph
gǔn
vertical stroke (here water residue)
Middle single vertical — visually just a stroke, but historically the contracted residue of a water stream once written between the figure and the hand. The original scene was washing a person's back with water; modern keeps only this thin trace of the flow. Reading: as a stylized water-line indicator, not a true component.

Stroke Order

yōu