chuáng
noun HSK 1 #516

Measure Word

zhāng

Meanings

  1. 1 bed

Characters

广 (shelter) + (wood) - wooden frame under a roof

Examples

HSK 1
Wǒ de chuáng hěn dà.
My bed is very big.
HSK 1
床上
Tā zài chuángshàng kàn shū.
He is reading in bed.
HSK 2
Mèimei zuò zài chuáng biān kàn shū.
My younger sister sits on the edge of the bed reading.

Tips

grammar
The measure word for beds is , the same one used for flat things like tables, paper, and tickets.
culture
Li Bai's famous poem 'Quiet Night Thoughts' begins with 床前明月光 - 'Before my bed, bright moonlight.'

Components

radical
广 yǎn
lean-to; shelter
The 'shelter' radical wraps the top-left - a side-view of a roof leaning against a wall. It indexes in the building/place family alongside shop, warehouse, courtyard, village. It signals 'something kept indoors under a roof.'
semantic
wood; tree
Inside sits 'wood' - a pictograph of a tree, here naming the material the bed is made from. Shelter + wood = the wooden frame you sleep on indoors. The compound is purely semantic, no phonetic. Same shelter-over-wood logic appears in many simple nouns; here it gives the directly readable 'wooden-thing-under-a-roof' = bed.

In Pop Culture

明月 Chuáng qián míngyuè guāng
Before my bed, bright moonlight
Opening line of Li Bai's 静夜思 (Quiet Night Thoughts).

Stroke Order

chuáng