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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

姓

xìng
surname; family name; clan name
  • Phono-semantic compound 形聲
  • HSK 2
  • TOCFL 1
  • radical 女
  • 8 strokes

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  • borrowed
  • derived
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  • meaning component
  • sound component
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Origin

Phono-semantic compound (形聲 /形声, OC *sleŋs): semantic 女 (“woman; female”) + phonetic 生 (OC *sʰleːŋ, *sreŋs).

Specialised form of 性 (xìng): “human nature; what is inborn” > “surname; clan name”.

From Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Lineage

  • meaningChinese女 “woman; (only of humans in Standard Chinese) female”
  • soundChinese生 “to live; to subsist; to exist”
    • ideaChinese屮 “new birth of plant”
    • ideaChinese一 “one”

Words built on it: 姓名, 老百姓

Meanings

character
  1. surname; family name; clan name
  2. to have the surname of
  3. to belong to; to be classified as
  4. a surname

Shuowen Jiezi 說文解字

姓：人所生也。古之神聖母，感天而生子，故稱天子。从女从生，生亦聲。《春秋傳》曰：“天子因生以賜姓。”

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

國語辭典 definitions

  1. 表示個人所屬家族或區別家族系統的符號。 例：貴姓、百家姓

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

How 姓 was written 字形演變

  1. 姓 in Oracle bone script
    Oracle bone
    甲骨文
    Shang, c. 1250–1050 BCE
  2. 姓 in Bronze script
    Bronze
    金文
    Shang–Zhou
  3. 姓 in Qin slips script
    Qin slips
    秦系簡牘
    Qin
  4. 姓 in Small seal script
    Small seal
    說文小篆
    Shuowen, c. 100 CE
  5. 姓 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: 姓