noun #33,954

Meanings

  1. 1 bright light
  2. 2 sunlight
  3. 3 to shine; literary/poetic

Examples

Tā de míngzi jiào Wáng Yù.
His name is Wang Yu.
Rì yù hū zhòu, yuè yù hū yè.
The sun shines by day; the moon shines by night. (classical phrasing)

Tips

memory
= (sun) on top of (stand) — a sun standing tall in the sky, hence 'bright, shining.' Mostly used in given names today (suggesting brilliance and brightness) rather than in everyday vocabulary.

Components

radical
sun
(the sun radical) supplies the meaning directly — is the bright shining of the sun, a poetic and personal-name char. The sun-on-top placement gives literal high light, fitting the sense of luminance from above.
phonetic
to stand
supplies the sound, drifted from lì to yù through an old initial change. Standing imagery also adds a faint flavour of upright brightness — sun standing tall in the sky. Same phonetic-shift family includes (yì, next day).

Stroke Order