The character 位 (wèi): place
- Pronunciation
- wèi
- Strokes
- 7
- Level
- HSK 3
- Radical
- 人
- Made of
- 亻立
What it means
position; location; place; seat; classifier for people (honorific); classifier for binary bits (e.g. 十六位 16-bit or 2 bytes); (physics) potential
Where its shape comes from
Xu Shen defines not place in general but one place: "the ranks to left and right in the middle of the court, these are what are called places", the exact spot each man occupies at an audience. He takes the graph apart as "from 人 and 立": a person, standing. Duan Yucai adds in 1815 the remark later works keep repeating: 立 and 位 were long one single character, and it was in parting from the first that the second came to mean the place rather than the standing.
Source: Xu Shen, Shuowen Jiezi (121 CE) and Duan Yucai's commentary (1815); the Chinese University of Hong Kong character database.
A way to remember it
Two characters you have already met, shoulder to shoulder: 人, the person of the first row, standing tight against the left edge, and the 立 of the twenty ninth, whole. The two small marks in the middle lean towards each other as they go down, they do not spread apart.
This is a memory aid, not the origin of the character.
Words it appears in
- 座位 zuò wèi · HSK 4 seat; CL:個|个[ge4]
- 单位 dān wèi · HSK 5 unit (of measure); unit (group of people as a whole); work unit (place of employment, esp. in the PRC prior to economic reform); CL:個|个[ge4]
- 位置 wèi zhi · HSK 5 position; place; seat; CL:個|个[ge4]
- 地位 dì wèi · HSK 5 position; status; place; CL:個|个[ge4]
- 位于 wèi yú · HSK 5 to be located at; to be situated at; to lie
- 职位 zhí wèi · HSK 6 position; post; job
Writing it
See the stroke order of 位, animated stroke by stroke.