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圣

kū / shèng
verb #1,286

Meanings

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

Examples

HSK 7-9
古人圣地取野菜。
Gǔrén kū dì qǔ yěcài.
The ancients dug at the earth to gather wild vegetables.
HSK 7-9
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