昆 kūn elder brother
descendants
How it came to be
象形 · Pictogram
A drawing of the thing it means.
The oldest form is a picture of an insect, with its body and legs.
用法
- Bound morpheme: it almost never stands alone in modern Chinese.
- Its one everyday job is the first syllable of 昆虫 kūnchóng (insect), a very common word.
- Otherwise it survives mainly in the formal/literary word 昆仲 kūnzhòng (elder and younger brothers), which learners will rarely need to produce.
- Don't try to use 昆 by itself to mean "brother": that sense is archaic and only lives inside compounds.