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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

飯

fàn
any cooked grain (rice, millet, etc.)
  • Phono-semantic compound 形聲
  • HSK 1
  • TOCFL 1
  • radical 食
  • 12 strokes

Etymology graph

  • inherited
  • borrowed
  • derived
  • parts
  • meaning component
  • sound component
  • related
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Origin

Etymology 1

Phono-semantic compound (形聲 /形声, OC *bonʔ, *bons): semantic 食 (“food”) + phonetic 反 (OC *panʔ, *pʰan).

Compare Proto-Mon-Khmer *puuŋ (“cooked rice”), whence Mon ပုၚ် (pɜŋ, “cooked rice”) (Ferlus, 1988).

Pronunciation 1 is the exopassive derivation of pronunciation 2, meaning "what is eaten" (Schuessler, 2007).

Etymology 2

Borrowed from English fan. Doublet of 粉絲／粉丝 (fěnsī).

From Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Lineage

  • meaningChinese食 “to eat; to have a meal; to take in”
    • ideaChinese亼 “mouth”
      • ideaChinese入 “to enter; to go into”
      • ideaChinese一 “one”
    • ideaChinese皀 “Prepared food, a vessel full of food (as in 即 and 既, in which is simplified)”
  • soundChinese反 “to turn over or flip; to turn around; to reverse; to change to an opposite position”
  • borrowedEnglishfan “A hand-held device consisting of concertinaed material, or slats of material, gathered together at …”
    • derivedEnglishfanatic “Fanatical.”
      • learned borrowingLatinfānāticus
      • derivedFrenchfanatique
    • derivedEnglishfancy “The imagination.”
      • derivedMiddle Englishfansy
      • inheritedMiddle Englishfancien
    • borrowedCantonese分

Related: Proto-Mon-Khmer *puuŋ, Mon ပုၚ်

Meanings

character
  1. any cooked grain (rice, millet, etc.)
  2. cooked rice (Classifier: 碗 m c h mn)
  3. meal (Classifier: 頓／顿 m mn; 餐 m c)
  4. noodles
  5. egg clusters shaped like rice balls (of some animals)

Shuowen Jiezi 說文解字

飯：食也。从食反聲。

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

國語辭典 definitions

  1. 經煮熟後可供食用的穀類食品。 例：稀飯、白米飯、糯米飯
  2. 每天定時吃的正餐。 例：早飯、晚飯

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

How 飯 was written 字形演變

  1. 飯 in Bronze script
    Bronze
    金文
    Shang–Zhou
  2. 飯 in Qin slips script
    Qin slips
    秦系簡牘
    Qin
  3. 飯 in Small seal script
    Small seal
    說文小篆
    Shuowen, c. 100 CE
  4. 飯 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: 飯