Phonetic Families & Components

Sound Roots & Semantic Radicals Explorer

Decode Chinese characters by their shared sound roots and see how semantic radicals split their meanings across tones.

Popular Roots:

孤

Phonetic Root (声旁 / Sound Core)HSK 6

孤 (gū)

lone, lonely

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Family Characters

HSK Words

Tone Fan-out (孤)

How this root's pronunciation drifts across the Mandarin tone spectrum:

1 Active Tones

Tone 1gū

Family Characters (2)

Root: 孤

孤

gū

HSK 6

Phonetic Root (声旁 / Sound Core)

lone, lonely

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菰

gū

Expansion

艹(plants)

Manchurian wild rice (Zizania latifolia), now rare in the wild, formerly harvested for its grain, now mainly cultivated for its edible stem known as 茭白筍|茭白笋[jiao1 bai2 sun3], which is swollen by a smut fungus; variant of 菇[gu1]

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