衙

yá
noun #68,663

Meanings

  1. 1 government office (in imperial times)
  2. 2 yamen

Examples

HSK 7-9
Gǔshíhou bǎixìng pà shàng yámen dǎ guānsi.
In old times, common people feared going to the yamen to file a lawsuit.
HSK 7-9
Tā yǐqián shì xiàn yá lǐ de xiǎo chāiyì.
He used to be a minor clerk in the county yamen.

Tips

usage
衙 appears almost only in 衙门 (yamen), the office of a government official in imperial China. The word is now historical or used figuratively for a bureaucratic, hard-to-deal-with office.

Components

radical
行 xíng
to walk; a row
The 行 element wraps around the outside as the indexing radical, its strokes split on the left and right of the inner part, framing the official compound one walks into.
phonetic
吾 wú
I; my
Inside sits 吾, supplying the sound, shifted from wú to yá. It carries no meaning here.

Stroke Order

衙 yá