里lǐ
Character evolution
里
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Simplified · Today
繁体
Traditional Chinese
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Shuowen
里 (lǐ), the picture of a field (田) with a horizontal line beneath, representing a piece of cultivated land and its boundary; it originally meant 'village' or 'inside', and later came to denote a unit of distance (li). In oracle bone script the character appears as a field with a ground line, showing why it is written this way.
Pinyin
lǐ· HSK 1