Definify.com

Definition 2024


Translingual

Han character

(radical 104 +12, 17 strokes, cangjie input 大口口山 (KRRU), four-corner 00172, composition)

References

  • KangXi: not present, would follow page 781, character 10
  • Dai Kanwa Jiten: character 22538
  • Dae Jaweon: page 1190, character 23
  • Hanyu Da Zidian: volume 4, page 2697, character 4
  • Unihan data for U+764C

Chinese

simp. and trad.

Glyph origin

Phono-semantic compound (形聲) : semantic  + phonetic  (OC *ŋrɯːm, *ŋjab); is a variant of .

Etymology

From (yán, “cliff; rock, stone”), since cancers often present as lumps or outgrowths on the body.

In Mandarin, this character used to be pronounced identically as (yán). Its pronunciation was changed to ái in the 1960s to avoid the homophony between (“cancer”) and (yán, “inflammation”) (compare 肺炎 (fèiyán, “pneumonia”) and 肺癌 (fèi'ái, “lung cancer”)). The new pronunciation of ái stems from dialectal pronunciations of (“rock; cliff”) /ŋai/, influenced by (yá, yái, “cliff”).

Pronunciation


Definitions

  1. cancer, carcinoma
       áizhèng   cancer

Compounds


Japanese

Kanji

(uncommon “Hyōgai” kanji)

  1. cancer

Readings

Compounds

Etymology

Kanji in this term
がん
Hyōgaiji
on'yomi

From Middle Chinese .

Pronunciation

Noun

(hiragana がん, romaji gan)

  1. (medicine, oncology, pathology) cancer
     (かれ)祖母 (そぼ) (がん) ()んだ。
    Kare no sobo wa gan de shinda.
    His grandmother died of cancer.
  2. (figuratively: a baneful but ineradicable evil): cancer
    中央集権体制 (ちゅうおうしゅうけんたいせい)社会 (しゃかい) (がん)になっている。
    Chūōshūken taisei wa shakai no gan ni natteiru.
    The centralized administrative system has become a cancer of the society.

References

  1. 2006, 大辞林 (Daijirin), Third Edition (in Japanese), Tōkyō: Sanseidō, ISBN 4-385-13905-9
  2. 1998, NHK日本語発音アクセント辞典 (NHK Japanese Pronunciation Accent Dictionary) (in Japanese), Tōkyō: NHK, ISBN 978-4-14-011112-3

Korean

Hanja

(am) (hangeul , revised am, McCune-Reischauer am, Yale am)

  1. This term needs a translation to English. Please help out and add a translation, then remove the text {{rfdef}}.

Vietnamese

Han character

(nham)

  1. This term needs a translation to English. Please help out and add a translation, then remove the text {{rfdef}}.