What 毀 means
It centers on damage; the surrounding word sets the sense.
The earliest recorded form appears on bronze from China's Warring States period. Later forms appear in manuscripts from Chu (an ancient Chinese state), seal script, Qin bamboo slips (records written on narrow strips), clerical script, and regular script. A 2021 study reads its components 臼 (a mortar), 土 (earth), and 殳 (a weapon) as pointing to breaking or destruction; that is one interpretation of its structure, while the script forms show gradual change.
In classical usage, 毀 could also mean to reduce or diminish. Its compounds use it for physical damage in 毀壞, verbal attack in 毀謗, and grief that wears a person down in 哀毀. The neighboring characters determine the specific sense.
Why is 毀 different from 毁?
毀 is traditional; 毁 is its simplified counterpart.
Readers using traditional and simplified Chinese therefore see different written forms for the same character. Older character records show 𣪷 as an earlier form; 燬 and 譭 are also recorded as related traditional variants.
Fonts draw the strokes, so their shapes can vary; the font alone does not turn 毀 into a different character.
Serious written vocabulary; the neighboring characters identify the specific sense.
Alone, 毀 leaves physical damage versus verbal attack unclear; read the surrounding word.
Part of the collection
Who writes 毀
Loading…
Don't confuse it with
1
Related characters
3
Combination ideas
3Questions people ask
1Why does 毀 show as a box on some devices?
Because that device's fonts have no glyph for it. The character is still correct and still copies correctly — the box is a missing glyph, not a broken character.
More like this
9
How to type or find 毀
- Search it as
- 毁 · 毁坏 · 毁谤 · 诋毁 · 销毁 · 摧毁 · 毁灭 · huǐ
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
毀\6BC0Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.