焚 (fén) · to burn, to set fire to

Meanings

1 to burn
2 to set fire to

Characters

焚

fén

to burn

Examples

HSK 7-9

他焚毁了所有的信件。

Tā fénhuǐ le suǒyǒu de xìnjiàn.

He burned all the letters.

HSK 7-9

寺庙里有人焚香祈福。

Sìmiào lǐ yǒurén fénxiāng qífú.

People burn incense and pray for blessings in the temple.

Tips

register

焚 is literary and formal. In everyday speech, 烧 is the common word for 'burn'. 焚 appears in set phrases like 焚烧, 焚毁, and 焚香.

history

Famous in the phrase 焚书坑儒 (fénshū kēngrú) - 'burning books and burying scholars alive' - referring to Qin Shi Huang's suppression of intellectual thought.

Components

radical

火 huǒ

fire

火 sits at the base in its full standalone form (not reduced to 灬) and serves as the indexing radical. The vertical stacking forest-over-fire is unusually direct: you can read the meaning straight off the picture. Sibling radicals 烧, 燃, 烫 share the family of burning verbs.

semantic

林 lín

forest; woods

林 (two trees side by side) sits on top - a literal forest. The whole graph is a transparent compound ideograph: forest above, fire below = burning the woods. Oracle-bone records show 焚 used for hunters setting bush-fires to drive game, the original meaning surviving in 焚书 (book-burning).