prison
English · prison
prison, jail
- 他被关进了监狱。tā bèi guān jìn le yù.He was locked up in prison.
- 入狱rù yùto go to prison, imprisonment
Topology: Left-right · Strokes: 11 strokes
Writing Balance Rule: The left dog radical (犭) takes up about one-third of the width, leaving the right side (言 and two 夫 components stacked) balanced with clean horizontal spacing.
Simplification Logic: The traditional form 獄 was simplified to 狱 by replacing the complex right-hand side with a streamlined phonetic component while maintaining the dog radical on the left.
Radical 犭 · Dog Radical (Animals, beasts, fierce entities)
Semantic Clue (形旁): 犭 (Indicates wild beasts or confinement of dangerous entities)
Phonetic Clue (声旁): 𠚣 (original sound: yù)
Picture two fierce dogs (犭) barking and arguing inside an enclosure, representing a place where criminals and fierce disputes are contained.
- 犭 Dog radical (animal/ferocious aspect)
- 言 Speech / argument / litigation
- 犬 Dog / ferocious beast
Phonetic Family (形声字家族)
2· Phonetic Root: 獄Origin: Originally depicted two dogs fighting or growling at each other, representing legal disputes and litigation. Over time, it came to mean the place where litigants and criminals are detained—the prison.
Semantic Evolution: From ancient disputes and litigation (lawsuits) to the physical institution where wrongdoers are kept (prison).
- In ancient China, courtrooms and detention facilities were closely linked conceptually as places of dispute resolution and punishment.
Fierce wild dogs (犭) are guarding the prison where people who broke the law with their words (言) are locked up.
yùConfusing the character structure with 域 (region) due to the identical right-hand side.
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