wěi
verb #23,688

Meanings

  1. 1 to wither
  2. 2 to wilt
  3. 3 to fade
  4. 4 to droop

Examples

Huāpíng lǐ de huā yǐjīng kāishǐ wěi le.
The flowers in the vase have started to wilt.
Jīngguò yī chǎng dà bìng, tā zhěnggè rén dōu wěi le.
After a serious illness, the whole person had become listless and wilted.

Tips

usage
can be used literally (plants withering) or figuratively (a person becoming dispirited or listless). In compounds: 萎缩 (to shrink/wither), 萎靡 (dispirited / sluggish).

Components

radical
cǎo
grass; plant (top radical)
Three-stroke grass radical on top, the indexing radical. means to wither or wilt — what a plant does when starved of water. Groups with dried up, to wither, to drop, desolate. The char also extends to dispirited people.
phonetic
wěi
to entrust; bend (here phonetic and semantic)
Bottom supplies the sound — wěi read straight across with no shift. also pulls a semantic thread: it pictures grain bending under its own ripe weight, and from there means to droop. So grass on top of a drooping plant gives the wilting image directly.

Stroke Order

wěi