淤
Tap the pinyin to hear it
silt; river sludge; to silt up; choked with silt; variant of 瘀[yu1]
- Strokes
- 11
- Radical
- 水 +8
- Structure
- Left–right 左右
- Traditional
- 淤
- Common rank
- #2,876
- Unicode
- U+6DE4
Formation & memory
Break the character into parts you already know.
How 淤 is formed
Phono-semantic compound (形声字)
氵 meaning “water” + 於 sound ()
Components 氵 於
How to remember it
silt · Heisig RSH #1731
水 water + compass + umbrella + ice
Keyword method from Heisig's Remembering Simplified Hanzi.
Words with 淤
The most common words first — learning a character in context makes it stick.
| Word | Pinyin | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| 出淤泥而不染 | lit. to grow out of the mud unsullied (idiom); fig. to be principled and incorruptible | |
| 淤血斑 | bruise; patch of bruising | |
| 清淤 | to dredge; to remove sludge | |
| 淤血 | variant of 瘀血[yu1 xue4] | |
| 淤青 | bruise; contusion | |
| 淤伤 | bruising | |
| 淤塞 | choked with silt; silted up | |
| 淤积 | to silt up; silt; sediment; ooze; slurry | |
| 淤泥 | silt; sludge; ooze | |
| 淤浅 | to silt up | |
| 淤灌 | to warp (fertilize land by flooding) | |
| 淤滞 | silted up; obstructed by silt; variant of 瘀滯|瘀滞[yu1 zhi4] | |
| 祛淤 | variant of 祛瘀[qu1 yu1] |
Sound family
Characters sharing the sound component 於 — compare how they read.
| Character | Pinyin | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| 於 sound part | at, in, on; to, from; alas! | |
| 瘀 | hematoma, contusion | |
| 阏 | to block, to obstruct, to stop up | |
| 菸 | tobacco, dried leaves; to fade |