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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

弄

nòng
to play with; to play around with; to fiddle with; to fondle
  • Ideogrammatic compound 會意
  • HSK 2
  • TOCFL 4
  • radical 廾
  • 7 strokes

Etymology graph

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  • borrowed
  • derived
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  • meaning component
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Origin

Etymology 1

Ideogrammic compound (會意 /会意): 玉 (“jade”) + 廾 (“hands”) – to touch jade with one's hands.

Compared with Khmer លួង (luəng, “to console; to cheer; to coax; to flatter”) < Old Khmer lvaṅ (“to cheer, amuse, entertain, divert”) < Pre-Angkorian Khmer loṅ. The Khmer initial consonant does not agree with Old Chinese; perhaps the Khmer word is a post-Han loan (Schuessler, 2007).

Etymology 2

Possibly from an ancient regional variant of 巷 (OC *ɡroːŋs, “alley”).

Etymology 3

Probably from Lingao ȵam¹ (“to play”) (Fu, 2008).

From Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Lineage

  • ideaChinese玉 “jade (originally nephrite, now also including jadeite)”
  • ideaChinese廾 “both hands”
  • borrowedLingaoȵam¹ “to play”

Related: Khmer លួង, Old Khmer lvaṅ

Meanings

character
  1. to play with; to play around with; to fiddle with; to fondle
  2. to enjoy; to play
  3. trick; magic
  4. to make fun of; to tease; to bully
  5. to show off; to make a show of
  6. to amuse (a child)

Shuowen Jiezi 說文解字

弄：玩也。从廾持玉。

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

國語辭典 definitions

  1. 小巷。 例：巷弄、弄堂

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

How 弄 was written 字形演變

  1. 弄 in Oracle bone script
    Oracle bone
    甲骨文
    Shang, c. 1250–1050 BCE
  2. 弄 in Bronze script
    Bronze
    金文
    Shang–Zhou
  3. 弄 in Qin slips script
    Qin slips
    秦系簡牘
    Qin
  4. 弄 in Small seal script
    Small seal
    說文小篆
    Shuowen, c. 100 CE
  5. 弄 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
  • Wiktionary (via Wiktextract / kaikki.org) — CC BY-SA 4.0
  • Wiktionary: 弄