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

渴

/kʰɤ²¹⁴/

thirsty

Phono-semantic compound 形聲
HSK 1
TOCFL 3
radical 水
12 strokes

Etymology graph

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Origin

Phono-semantic compound (形聲 /形声, OC *kʰaːd, *ɡrad): semantic 氵 (“water”) + phonetic 曷 (OC *ɡaːd); dry, exhausted (of water).

From Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Lineage

meaningChinese水 “water (Classifier: 瓶 m; 樽 c; 滴 m c; 池 m c; 盆 m c; 杯 m c)”
soundChinese曷 “why; what; where; how; when”
- soundChinese匃
- meaningChinese曰 “to say; to speak”

Words built on it: 渴望

Meanings

character

thirsty
tired

Shuowen Jiezi 說文解字

渴：盡也。从水曷聲。

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

國語辭典 definitions

反流的水。唐朝柳宗元〈袁家渴記〉說：「楚越之間方言，謂水之反流者為渴，音若衣褐之褐。」

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

How 渴 was written 字形演變

Bronze
金文
Shang–Zhou
Small seal
說文小篆
Shuowen, c. 100 CE
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: 渴