gōng
noun

Meanings

  1. 1 old variant of 肱, the upper arm (archaic)
  2. 2 old variant of 宏, vast, great (rare)

Examples

HSK 7-9
Zhōngchén zhě, jūn zhī gōng gǔ yě.
Loyal ministers are the arms and thighs of the ruler.
HSK 7-9
Jiǎgǔwén zhōng de gōng zì huà chū wān qū de shàngbì.
In oracle-bone inscriptions, the graph 厷 depicts a bent upper arm.

Tips

history
is the older form whose original meaning was 'upper arm' - the oracle-bone graph showed a bent arm with the elbow flexed. Later writers added the flesh radical ⺼ to clarify the anatomical sense, giving the modern character . The famous classical pair 股肱 ('thighs and arms' → trusted ministers) preserves the underlying body-part imagery.
register
Archaic - definitions follow classical attestation only. Modern Chinese always writes for the arm sense and for the 'vast' sense. You encounter only as a component element (it's the right side of 'male' and 'expand') or in transcribed oracle-bone studies.

Components

pictograph
gōng
upper arm
Pictograph of a bent upper arm with a small marker indicating the bicep / elbow joint. Indexed under Kangxi #28 (the curl) by tradition; the radical isn't transparently semantic in the modern form. Lives on as the right component of , , and as the inner phonetic of .

Filed under radical (sī, #28) by convention. is not a separate component in , so no strokes are highlighted.

Stroke Order

gōng