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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

已

/i²¹⁴/
to stop; to finish
  • HSK 3
  • TOCFL 4
  • radical 己
  • 3 strokes

Etymology graph

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Origin

Etymology 1

Etymology not clear (Schuessler, 2007). The “already” sense is lexicalized from the verb “to finish; to complete”, and gradually became more common than 既 (OC *kɯds), the older word for “already”, in the mid- to late first millennium BCE (Pulleyblank, 1995).

Etymology 2

Possibly a fusion of 也 (OC *laːlʔ) and 矣 (OC *ɢlɯʔ), explaining why the latter is never found after the former (Pulleyblank, 1995).

From Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Lineage

  • partChinese㇆
  • partChinese一 “one”
  • partChinese乚

Words built on it: 已經, 早已

Meanings

character
  1. to stop; to finish
  2. already; have done something

國語辭典 definitions

  1. 停止、完畢。 例：風雨如晦，雞鳴不已。（《詩經．鄭風．風雨》）
  2. 既經、業經。 例：時間早已過了。

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

How 已 was written 字形演變

  1. 已 in Bronze script
    Bronze
    金文
    Shang–Zhou
  2. 已 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

  • Structural decomposition (chaizi) — See upstream
  • 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
  • Written form — n/a
  • Wiktionary (via Wiktextract / kaikki.org) — CC BY-SA 4.0
  • Wiktionary: 已