The character 出 (chū): to go out
- Pronunciation
- chū
- Strokes
- 5
- Level
- HSK2
- Radical
- 凵
- Made of
- 凵山
What it means
to go out; to come out; to arise; to occur; to produce; to yield; to go beyond; to exceed; (used after a verb to indicate an outward direction or a positive result); classifier for dramas, plays, operas etc
Where its shape comes from
The two stacked basins of today's character are not two mountains, and the resemblance is an accident of later tidying up. On the earliest inscriptions the graph shows a footprint, the one written 止 (zhǐ), coming out of a hollow, a pit or an enclosure: leaving a place. Xu Shen, who did not have those forms in front of him, read something quite different, "a plant growing up and out". The footprint reading is the one that prevails today, and neither of the two brings in any mountain.
Source: Xu Shen, Shuowen Jiezi (121 CE); the Chinese University of Hong Kong character database.
How it used to be written
-
Oracle bone script 商 -
Clerical script 東漢 - See all 19 forms
Forms, sources and dates: the 字形演變 database of 小學堂, Academia Sinica, public domain (CC0).
A way to remember it
Two basins threaded on one and the same upright shaft: the upper basin has exactly the shape of 山 (shān), the mountain, and the lower one is the same again, only wider. The bottom bar is the LAST line of the character and the shaft stops there; only the short upright on the right runs a little below it.
This is a memory aid, not the origin of the character.
Words it appears in
- 出租车 chū zū chē · HSK1 taxi; (Tw) rental car
- 出来 chū lái · HSK2 to come out; to appear; to arise
- 出去 chū qù · HSK2 to go out
- 出门 chū mén · HSK2 to go out; to leave home; to go on a journey; away from home; (of a woman) to get married
- 出国 chū guó · HSK2 to go abroad; to leave the country
- 出生 chū shēng · HSK3 to be born
See the 75 HSK words built on 出, grouped by level.
Writing it
See the stroke order of 出, animated stroke by stroke.