買

See also: 买 and 員

買 U+8CB7, 買 CJK UNIFIED IDEOGRAPH-8CB7 ← 貶 [U+8CB6] CJK Unified Ideographs 貸 → [U+8CB8]

Translingual

Stroke order

Han character

買 (Kangxi radical 154, 貝+5, 12 strokes, cangjie input 田中月山金 (WLBUC), four-corner 6080₆, composition ⿱罒貝)

Descendants

• 賣, 䁲, 㵋, 蕒, 鷶, 嘪

References

• Kangxi Dictionary: page 1206, character 21
• Dai Kanwa Jiten: character 36708
• Dae Jaweon: page 1669, character 9
• Hanyu Da Zidian (first edition): volume 6, page 3633, character 7
• Unihan data for U+8CB7

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Chinese

trad.		買
simp.		买
nonstandard simp.		𧹒
alternative forms		𧵽

Glyph origin

Historical forms of the character 買
Shang	Spring and Autumn
Bronze inscriptions	Bronze inscriptions

Characters in the same phonetic series (買) (Zhengzhang, 2003) 

	Old Chinese
買	*mreːʔ
蕒	*mreːʔ
嘪	*mreːʔ
鷶	*mreːʔ
賣	*mreːs

Ideogrammic compound (會意／会意) : 网 (“net”) + 貝 (“money cowrie”).

Baxter and Sagart (2014) consider it to be a phono-semantic compound (形聲／形声) : abbreviated phonetic 羅 (*rˤaj) + semantic 貝 (“money cowrie”).

Etymology

Possibly from Proto-Sino-Tibetan *g/m/s-laj ~ *r/s-lej ~ *b-rej (“to buy; to barter”); compare Proto-Karen *breᴬ (“to buy”), Proto-Bodo-Garo *prai¹ (“to buy”), Tibetan རྗེ (rje, “to exchange; to barter”) (Schuessler, 2007; Sagart, 1999, 2011). Benedict (1967, 1972) considers this allofam to be a result of borrowing from Austro-Tai *(m)baḷi several times into Sino-Tibetan languages.

Alternatively, Haudricourt and Strecker (1991) consider 買 and 賣 to be borrowed from Hmong-Mien, which may have a family of verbs related to possession: *mɛjX (“to buy”, corresponding to 買), *mɛjH (“to buy”, corresponding to 賣), *ʔ-mɛj (“to grasp”), *n-mɛj (“to have”) (Ratliff, 2010). However, Sagart (1995) argues that the direction of borrowing is more likely to be from Chinese to Hmong-Mien because Hmong-Mien does not seem to have a suffix that would give rise to the tone in the word for “to buy”. In addition to these two ways of relating the Chinese word to Hmong-Mien, Ratliff (2010) proposes common inheritance as a third option and maintains that more evidence is needed to determine which of the three explanations are correct.

Definitions

(deprecated template usage) 買

1. to buy; to purchase

   我買了輛新車。／我买了辆新车。  ―  Wǒ mǎi le liàng xīn chē.  ―  I bought a new car.

2. to bribe
3. to persuade
4. a surname

Antonyms

• (to buy): 賣／卖 (mài, “to sell”)

Descendants

• → Proto-Hmong-Mien: *mɛjX (“to buy”)

Further reading

• “Entry #9063”, in 教育部臺灣台語常用詞辭典 [Dictionary of Frequently-Used Taiwan Minnan] (overall work in Mandarin and Hokkien), Ministry of Education, R.O.C., 2024.

(deprecated template usage)

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Japanese

Kanji

買

(Second grade kyōiku kanji)

1. to buy

Readings

• Go-on: め (me)
• Kan-on: ばい (bai, Jōyō)
• Kun: かう (kau, 買う, Jōyō)^{←かふ (kafu, 買ふ, historical)}

Compounds

• 買収(ばいしゅう) (baishū)
• 買(か)い物(もの) (kaimono)

Antonyms

• 売

Derived terms

• 買(か)う (kau)

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Korean

Hanja

買 (eumhun 살 매 (sal mae))

1. hanja form^? of 매 (“buy”)
2. "Goguryeo" language: me, “river, water”

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Vietnamese

Han character

買: Hán Nôm readings: mãi, mạy, mảy, mấy, mới, mái, mải, với

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