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圣

kū / shèng
verb #1,286

Meanings

  1. 1 to dig with persistent effort (especially gathering wild vegetables)

Examples

古人圣地取野菜。
Gǔrén kū dì qǔ yěcài.
The ancients dug at the earth to gather wild vegetables.
她蹲在田里圣荠菜。
Tā dūn zài tián lǐ kū jìcài.
She crouched in the field digging up shepherd's purse.

Tips

register
Pure literary / classical reading. Survives in older farming and herb-gathering texts; essentially never met in modern speech, news, or fiction. Every modern occurrence of 圣 — sacred Christmas, saints, sages, sword-masters — uses the shèng reading, not kū.
memory
The shape fits the meaning: a hand (又) digging into earth (土). This was the graph's original job before the 1956 reform reassigned it to carry the load of traditional 聖.

Components

radical
土 tǔ
earth; soil
Bottom 土 — the indexing radical, and here also semantically active: the substance being dug. Hand-over-earth is a transparent ideographic picture of the digging action, unlike the shèng sense where the same graph is meaning-borrowed.
semantic
又 yòu
right hand
Top 又 — a right hand. Under the kū reading the picture is literal: a hand reaching down to scrape at soil. This is the original native meaning of the 5-stroke graph before it was redeployed as the simplified form of 聖.

Stroke Order

圣 kū