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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

洗

xǐ
to wash; to rinse
  • Phono-semantic compound 形聲
  • HSK 1
  • TOCFL 3
  • radical 水
  • 9 strokes
  • 洒

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Origin

Phono-semantic compound (形聲 /形声, OC *sɯːlʔ, *sɯːnʔ): semantic 水 (“water”) + phonetic 先 (OC *sɯːn, *sɯːns).

From Proto-Sino-Tibetan *sjərl (“to wash; to bathe”) (cf. Schuessler, 2007; STEDT, reconstructing Proto-Tibeto-Burman *m/b-s(y)il ~ *m/b-syal). Cognate with 洒 (OC *sraːls, *sɯːlʔ, “to wash”), Tibetan བསིལ (bsil, “to wash”), Mizo sil (“to wash”); more distant cognates may include Burmese ဆေး (hce:, “to wash”).

From Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Lineage

  • inheritedProto-Sino-Tibetan*sjərl “to wash; to bathe”
  • meaningChinese水 “water (Classifier: 瓶 m; 樽 c; 滴 m c; 池 m c; 盆 m c; 杯 m c)”
  • soundChinese先 “first; ahead of time; before; beforehand”
    • ideaChinese止 “foot”
    • ideaChinese儿 “standing person”

Related: Tibetan བསིལ, Mizo sil, Burmese ဆေး

Words built on it: 洗澡

Meanings

character
  1. to wash; to rinse
  2. to clean; to purify
  3. to redress; to right
  4. baptism
  5. to kill and loot; to sack
  6. to develop (a photo)

Shuowen Jiezi 說文解字

洗：洒足也。从水先聲。

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

國語辭典 definitions

  1. 姓。

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

How 洗 was written 字形演變

  1. 洗 in Small seal script
    Small seal
    說文小篆
    Shuowen, c. 100 CE
  2. 洗 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: 洗