zhú / shù
noun #2,996

Meanings

  1. 1 atractylodes (medicinal rhizome, used in Chinese medicine)

Examples

Báizhú shì yíwèi chángyòng de zhōngyào.
Bai-zhu is a commonly used Chinese herbal medicine.
Zhège fāngzi lǐjiā le cāngzhú.
Cang-zhu has been added to this prescription.

Tips

register
The zhú reading appears only in traditional-medicine plant names — 白术 (báizhú) and 苍术 (cāngzhú), both Atractylodes rhizomes used in herbal prescriptions. You will see it on herb-shop labels and in TCM recipes; everywhere else reads shù.
history
The zhú reading is actually the older botanical sense — the character originally named the atractylodes plant, which is why the tree radical sits in the graph. When the traditional 'technique, art' merged into in modern simplified writing, the everyday shù reading took over and zhú was relegated to a handful of fixed herb names.

Components

radical
tree; wood
The tree radical is the indexing semantic and the botanical anchor. For the zhú reading the radical is doing its full job: this is the plant — a perennial rhizome whose dried root enters Chinese medicine.
ideograph
zhǔ
dot marker
The small dot is a differentiating marker, same as in the shù reading — abstract, no real-world depiction, just a position-marker keeping visually distinct from and .

Stroke Order

zhú