---
title: "藥 - Dong Chinese dictionary"
url: https://stacklist.com/card/713d2bd5-0fb2-478c-8f45-345937a40fa8
source_url: "https://www.dong-chinese.com/wiki/%E8%97%A5"
stack: https://stacklist.com/stack/afaedacb-6be2-4e33-aa06-e1c74a72e2f8
summary: "Herbal Medicine in Traditional Chinese Culture explores the etymology and evolution of the Chinese character 藥 (yào), meaning medicine or drugs. The character is a phonosemantic compound combining 艹 (grass) as the meaning component and 樂 (music/happy) as the sound component, with historical pronunciation and script evolution documented from Bronze script through modern Regular script."
tags: "chinese-medicine, herbal-medicine, etymology, character-analysis, phonosemantic, traditional-chinese"
key_entities: "Traditional Chinese Medicine (concept), Phonosemantic compound (concept), China (location), Western Zhou (event), Seal script (concept), Academia Sinica (organization)"
classification: "reference"
content_hash: "sha256:3c37730760bca874a69809466bc050840e1cdd19102d564da22c54189ed5c490"
acp_version: "0.2"
token_counts_approximate: 376
visibility: public
agent_accessible: true
status: "final"
---

# 藥 - Dong Chinese dictionary

藥 yào medicine Phonosemantic compound. 艹 represents the meaning and 樂 represents the sound. Components 艹 meaning component 艹 Meaning component cao , cǎo grass 艹 is a component form of 艸 . 樂 sound component 樂 Sound component lè , yuè happy, music 藥 and 樂 don't sound similar in modern Mandarin due to historical phonetic changes. They were more similar in older Chinese. 藥 /*m-r[e]wk/ 樂 /*[r]ˤawk/, /*[r]ˤawk/, /*[ŋ]ˤrawk-s/, /*[ŋ]ˤrawk/ Evolution Bronze script Late Western Zhou (~800 BC) Seal script Shuowen (~100 AD) Clerical script Western Jin dynasty (266-316 AD) 藥 Regular script Modern Regular script Modern More Definitions 药 ( 藥 ) yào drugs, pharmaceuticals, medicine; medicine; drug; substance used for a specific purpose (e.g. poisoning, explosion, fermenting); CL: 種 | 种 [zhǒng] , 服 [fù] , 味 [wèi] ; to poison Most common words with 藥 Freq. Word Meaning 药 drug 药物 medicaments 药品 medicaments 医药 medical 中药 (traditional) Chinese medicine More Historical pronunciation Old Chinese Middle Chinese Pinyin Gloss *m-r[e]wk yak yào medicinal plant Statistics Not found in HSK word list Appears in 51.0812% of movies 602nd most common character in movies 662nd most common character in books Miscellaneous Strokes 18 Simplified 药 Unicode U+85E5 Shuowen “藥，治病艸。从艸，樂聲。” Sources Academia Sinica Make Me a Hanzi Unicode Baxter-Sagart Dong Chinese CC-CEDICT SUBTLEX-CH MTSU Chinese text computing 漢語多功能字庫 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License .