違 is widely used in legal, logical, and everyday contexts to express violation or difference.
The core idea is “going against the expected direction or norm.”
 
Related characters:

to turn back, return, to oppose, to reverse

back (of the body), to turn one’s back, behind, to carry on the back, to recite, to memorize

to differ, to dispatch, to recover, uneven, irregular

Traditionally analyzed as a compound ideograph or phono-semantic compound:


to walk slowly, to go slowly

 — semantic component meaning “to walk; movement”;


leather, tanned leather

— phonetic component indicating the sound (위 / wéi).
The idea is of moving in a different direction, leading to meanings like deviation, opposition, or violation.
 
Semantic development:
- to move in a different direction;
- to deviate or differ;
- to oppose or violate.

위반 (違反) — violation
위배 (違背) — contradiction; breach
위법 (違法) — illegal; unlawful
상위 (相違) — difference; discrepancy

Characters

Words

Vocabulary

finally, at last, to advance, to accomplish/achieve, to escape, to recommend, to raise/nurture, to follow, to hesitate, road, path

to meet, to encounter, to face

to play, to have fun, to amuse oneself, to wander, travel

to carry, to move, fortune, luck

widely, everywhere, pervasively, a round, a turn, a time

to pass, to cross over, to exceed, mistake, fault, past

road, path, way, method, doctrine, principle, to lead, to guide

to reach, to arrive, to go through

to go against, to violate, to differ, to be wrong

far, distant, remote, far away

to be humble, modest, to yield

to alternate, to pass on, relay

distant, far away

to suit, to fit, to be appropriate

to block, to cover, to shield

to flee, to escape, to withdraw, to evade

to be slow, sluggish, to be late, delayed

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

違

Etymology

Usage in Korean

Additional notes

Words that derived from 違

Neighboring characters in the dictionary