雾

霧
wù
noun HSK 5 #4,638

Meanings

  1. 1 fog
  2. 2 mist

Examples

HSK 1
Jīntiān zǎoshang yǒu hěn dà de wù.
There was very thick fog this morning.
HSK 6
Wù tài dà le, kàn bù qīng lù.
The fog is too thick; I can't see the road clearly.

Tips

memory
雾 has the rain radical (雨) on top - fog is like rain that stays in the air.

Components

radical
雨 yǔ
rain
Top 雨 depicts droplets falling from a cloud. As the indexing radical it puts 雾 in the family of weather/precipitation chars - 雪 (snow), 雷 (thunder), 霜 (frost), 露 (dew). Fog is essentially suspended rain that hasn't condensed into drops, so the radical is conceptually exact.
phonetic
务 wù
task; affair
Bottom 务 supplies the sound (wù → wù, identical reading) - pure phonetic borrow with no semantic contribution. 务 itself is the simplified form of 務 and contributes only the sound. Same wù-reading also appears in 雾's homophone family with chars like 误, 悟.

Stroke Order

雾 wù