A common morpheme in modern place names, especially for continents (洲 = “continent” in modern usage).
Distinction: 洲 = islet/sandbank or continent; 島 = sea island.

Phono-semantic compound:
Water radical (水) provides the meaning “related to water.”
州 (고을 주) provides the sound.
Together, the character conveys the sense of land within water, formed by sediment deposits.

三角洲 (삼각주) — delta (land at the mouth of a river).
洲渚 (주저) — islets and sandbanks.
亞洲 (아주) — Asia (lit. “eastern continent”).
歐洲 (구주) — Europe.

Characters

Words

Vocabulary

wave, ripple, flow, undulation

to pour, to flow, to irrigate, to focus, to concentrate

ocean, vast sea

to wash, sprinkle, scatter water, purify

to wash, cleanse, rinse

valley, hollow, cave, village, settlement

ferry, ford, crossing point in a river, sap, liquid

vast, great, immense, flood, deluge

sandbank, islet, shoal, river islet

to live, to be alive, lively, active, flowing, moving, fresh

branch, stream, faction

to flow, to circulate, to drift, to spread, to diffuse

sea, ocean

name of the Jing River, to flow, to pass through

to disappear, to vanish, to reduce, to eliminate

liquid, fluid, juice

clean, pure, clear

The content on this page provided under the CC BY-NC-SA license.

Chinese character

Explore 214 Chinese radicals and their derived characters. Sort by radical or stroke count, and view the complete list of official Hanja radicals.

Chinese characters (Hanja)

Chinese characters dictionary

洲

Etymology

Usage in Korean

Words that derived from 洲

Additional notes

Neighboring characters in the dictionary

References