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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

秒

miǎo
awn; arista
  • Phono-semantic compound 形聲
  • HSK 5
  • TOCFL 5
  • radical 禾
  • 9 strokes

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Origin

Phono-semantic compound (形聲 /形声, OC *mewʔ): semantic 禾 (“cereal; grain”) + phonetic 少 (OC *hmjewʔ, *hmjews).

Related to 藐 (OC *mawʔ, “small; to think little of”), 杪 (OC *mewʔ, “tip of a branch; tiny”), 眇 (OC *mewʔ, “tiny”), 渺 (OC *mewʔ, “tiny”) (Wang, 1982).

From Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Lineage

  • meaningChinese禾 “grain; cereal”
  • soundChinese少 “few; little in number; less; not many”

Meanings

character
  1. awn; arista
  2. tiny; minute; insignificant
  3. tip; end; extremity
  4. Classifier for time: second
  5. Classifier for measuring an angle or latitude/longitude: second; arcsecond
  6. unit of length equal to 0.0001 cun

Shuowen Jiezi 說文解字

秒：禾芒也。从禾少聲。

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

國語辭典 definitions

  1. 穀物的芒。 例：禾秒、麥秒
  2. 量詞

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

How 秒 was written 字形演變

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