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Etymology data from Wiktionary via Wiktextract (CC BY-SA 4.0). Chinese character data from the 說文解字, the Taiwan MOE 國語辭典簡編本 (CC BY-ND 3.0 TW) and HSK/TOCFL lists.

Explanations are written by a local model (gemma4) and only published after a verification pass against the cited sources. How it works.

Chinese

城

chéng
city wall
  • Phono-semantic compound 形聲
  • HSK 3
  • TOCFL 3
  • radical 土
  • 9 strokes

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Origin

Phono-semantic compound (形聲 /形声, OC *djeŋ): semantic 土 (“soil”) + phonetic 成 (OC *djeŋ), since city walls were originally made of stamped earth.

Cognate with 成 (OC *djeŋ, “to complete; city walls”), 盛 (OC *djeŋ, “to hold with a receptacle”), 盛 (OC *djeŋs, “abundant; flourishing”), as 城 (OC *djeŋ, “city wall”) was made of filled-in or stamped earth (Schuessler, 2007). See 成 for more.

Its original meaning was "city walls" and was originally written as 成; later, it started to indicate the city (i.e., the part of territory within the city walls) due to metonymy since a single part of a city indicates the city itself.

From Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Lineage

  • meaningChinese土 “earth; soil”
  • soundChinese成 “to succeed; to accomplish; to achieve; to finish; to complete”
    • meaningChinese戊 “the fifth of the ten heavenly stems”
    • soundChinese丁 “the fourth of the ten heavenly stems”

Words built on it: 城市

Meanings

character
  1. city wall
  2. city, town, especially (historical) walled city
  3. walled district within a city
  4. large commercial venue
  5. to construct city walls
  6. a surname

Shuowen Jiezi 說文解字

城：以盛民也。从土从成，成亦聲。

Xu Shen, c. 100 CE — the first analytical dictionary of Chinese characters.

國語辭典 definitions

  1. 古時環繞京師或某一都市、區域以供防守的高大圍牆。 例：城郭、內城、外城
  2. 都市。 例：京城、城鎮
  3. 姓。

© Ministry of Education, Taiwan — CC BY-ND 3.0 TW, shown unaltered.

How 城 was written 字形演變

  1. 城 in Bronze script
    Bronze
    金文
    Shang–Zhou
  2. 城 in Chu slips & silk script
    Chu slips & silk
    楚系簡帛
    Warring States
  3. 城 in Qin slips script
    Qin slips
    秦系簡牘
    Qin
  4. 城 in Small seal script
    Small seal
    說文小篆
    Shuowen, c. 100 CE
  5. 城 in Regular script
    Regular
    楷書
    since c. 200 CE

Historical forms collected by the legacy etymfun dataset; most characters have several attested variants.

Sources

  • Historical glyph forms (zdic.net 字形演变) — Rights unverified
  • HSK / TOCFL word lists — Facts (levels)
  • 教育部《國語辭典簡編本》 (Taiwan MOE) — CC BY-ND 3.0 TW
  • 說文解字 Shuowen Jiezi (Xu Shen, c. 100 CE) — Public domain
  • Written form — n/a
  • Wiktionary (via Wiktextract / kaikki.org) — CC BY-SA 4.0
  • Wiktionary: 城