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零líng

Character evolution

零

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Simplified · Today

Shuowen

零. The character combines the rain radical 雨 with the phonetic component 令, forming a composite of rain and command. Originally this depicted drizzling or scattered raindrops—small, fragmented precipitation—and the notion of incompleteness led to its later semantic extension to mean zero or nothing, as in the gap between numbers.

Pinyin

líng· HSK 1