鼻 Radical 209 — a nose; the sense of smell
a nose; the sense of smell
Where the shape comes from
The old nose-picture 自 (radical 132) sits on top, kept as a mark of meaning, but by the Warring States period that character had drifted so far toward oneself that a new, unambiguous form was needed for the body part itself: 畀 bì was fitted underneath purely to fix the pronunciation, giving 鼻, a nose, read almost exactly like its phonetic. It names the organ in 鼻子, a nose, and 鼻音, a nasal sound, and supplies a curious extension in 鼻祖, a founder or originator — the Han-dynasty dialect dictionary Fangyan glosses 鼻 itself as 始, to begin, the same drift toward source and origin that had already carried its parent 自 toward from and since.
characters filed under 鼻
No published character on HSK Guide is filed under this radical yet. Character explorer.