About
The character 仟 is a phonosemantic compound formed by the person radical 亻 (meaning) on the left and 千 (qiān), the standard character for 'thousand', on the right to provide the sound. Originally, it denoted an officer who led a thousand soldiers, a military title that has long since vanished. In modern Chinese, 仟 is used exclusively as the formal, fraud-resistant numeral for 'one thousand' in accounting, banking, and legal papers. Its more complex structure, thanks to the added 亻, helps deter forgery by making unauthorized alterations of the number much harder than with the simple 千.
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