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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

島

dǎo
island (Classifier: 座 m; 個／个 m c mn; 粒 mn; 塊／块 mn)
  • Phono-semantic compound 形聲
  • HSK 6
  • TOCFL 5
  • radical 山
  • 10 strokes

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Origin

Phono-semantic compound (形聲 /形声, OC *tuːwʔ): phonetic 鳥 (OC *tɯːwʔ) + semantic 山 (“mountain”).

Reminiscent of Mon လ္ကံ (from Proto-Mon-Khmer *tkɔɔʔ), but probably not related (Schuessler, 2007).

From Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Lineage

  • soundChinese鳥 “bird (Classifier: 隻／只 m; 群 m)”
  • meaningChinese山 “mountain; hill (Classifier: 座 m c; 粒 mn)”

Related: Mon လ္ကံ, Proto-Mon-Khmer *tkɔɔʔ

Meanings

character
  1. island (Classifier: 座 m; 個／个 m c mn; 粒 mn; 塊／块 mn)
  2. a surname, Dao

國語辭典 definitions

  1. 被水圍繞的小塊陸地。 例：島嶼、荒島、群島

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

How 島 was written 字形演變

  1. 島 in Small seal script
    Small seal
    說文小篆
    Shuowen, c. 100 CE
  2. 島 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
  • Wiktionary (via Wiktextract / kaikki.org) — CC BY-SA 4.0
  • Wiktionary: 島