sōu
verb

Meanings

  1. 1 (of wind) to whistle; the rushing sound of wind (literary)
  2. 2 to be chilled or dried by the wind (literary)

Examples

Lěngfēng sōusōu de guā guò, dàjiā dōu dǎ le gè hánzhàn.
The cold wind whistled past, and everyone shivered.

Tips

history
rarely stands alone in modern Chinese; it survives mostly in the reduplication 飕飕 (the whistling of wind) and 凉飕飕 (chilly). It joins the wind radical (traditional ) with the phonetic .
register
Literary and bound; appears in onomatopoeic wind compounds, not as a free word in plain speech.

Components

radical
fēng
wind
The wind radical (traditional ) wraps the outside and marks the meaning: the rushing, whistling sound of wind.
phonetic
sǒu
old man (phonetic element)
Sits inside the wind frame and supplies the sound (reading shifted from sǒu to sōu). It carries no meaning here, only the phonetic frame.

Stroke Order

sōu