Character: 厲
Modern (Beijing) reading: lì
Preclassic Old Chinese: rats
Classic Old Chinese: rać
Western Han Chinese: raś
Eastern Han Chinese: raś
Early Postclassic Chinese: leś
Middle Postclassic Chinese: lèj
Late Postclassic Chinese: lèj
Middle Chinese: lèj
English meaning : to drag or trail something along
Russian meaning[s]: 1) точить, оттачивать; 2) угнетать; жестокий, свирепый; суровый; злой; строгий; 3) подбодрять, стимулировать; 4) болезнь, припадок; 5) Ли (фамилия)
Comments: For *r- cf. Min forms: Xiamen le6, Chaozhou li4, Fuzhou la6. Schüssler gives the general meaning as 'to drag or trail something along and have it scraped or whetted', thus uniting several particular meanings attested in Early Zhou: 'to drag, train' (whence possibly a colloquial Viet. loan lê 'to drag'; cf. perhaps also Viet. lết 'to drag' - from a dialectal unattested variant MC *let ?); 'to wet clothes'; 'a ford'; 'whetstone, to grind'. The character is also used for homonymous words: *rats 'be cruel, wicked'; *rats 'epidemic, infectious disease' - whence Viet. lây 'contagious, infectious, to infect'. Standard Sino-Viet. is lệ.
Radical: 27
Four-angle index: 4002
Karlgren code: 0340 a
Vietnamese reading: lê
Jianchuan Bai: ji3
Dali Bai: ji3
Bijiang Bai: ji2
Shijing occurrences: 34.1_
