The character 有 (yǒu): to have

A New Year market stall under a bright red awning: red lanterns with gold caps and yellow tassels, bundles of blank red paper scrolls on a wooden trestle and in a crate, a grey brick wall, blue sky. A large flat coral hand, palm toward the viewer and fingers spread, holds a plain red envelope edged with gold. At the right, on the wall, the character 有 in solid black, its top bar crossed by a stroke sweeping down to the left over a two barred frame.
Pronunciation
yǒu
Strokes
6
Level
HSK1
Radical
月
Made of
左月

What it means

to have; there is; (bound form) having; with; -ful; -ed; -al (as in 有意[you3yi4] intentional)

Where its shape comes from

On the oracle bones this character is a hand and nothing more, the same hand that is written 又 yòu on its own. The bronze inscriptions add flesh, 肉 ròu, which shrinks inside a character to a shape indistinguishable from the moon, as it does in 脸 liǎn, the face. That gives the modern graph: a hand laid on a piece of meat, so to hold, so to possess. Xu Shen read the upper part as a sound indicator instead, and palaeographers no longer follow him there.

Source: Xu Shen, Shuowen Jiezi (121 CE); the Chinese University of Hong Kong character database.

How it used to be written

Forms, sources and dates: the 字形演變 database of 小學堂, Academia Sinica, public domain (CC0).

A way to remember it

A bar, a stroke that crosses it and runs away downwards to the left, and beneath them a frame with two bars inside. The frame looks like 月 yuè, the moon: its left upright is STRAIGHT, where the moon's curves. That is the only visible difference between them, and it is enough.

This is a memory aid, not the origin of the character.

Words it appears in

See the 54 HSK words built on 有, grouped by level.

Writing it

See the stroke order of 有, animated stroke by stroke.

Share this page