杉 (shān): fir tree

Measure Word

一棵杉树 kē

Meanings

1 fir tree
2 China fir
3 cedar

Characters

杉

shān

fir; cedar

Examples

HSK 3

山上种了很多杉树。

Shān shàng zhòng le hěnduō shānshù.

Many fir trees were planted on the mountain.

HSK 5

杉木是很好的建筑材料。

Shānmù shì hěn hǎo de jiànzhù cáiliào.

Fir wood is a great building material.

Tips

usage

杉 usually appears in compounds: 杉树 (fir tree), 杉木 (fir wood), 水杉 (dawn redwood). Rarely used alone in modern Chinese.

Components

radical

木 mù

tree; wood

Tree radical on the left - the indexing semantic. 木 is the canonical tree pictograph (trunk, branches, roots). 杉 names the cedar / China fir, a specific tree species, so the radical does direct duty. Joins the tree-species family: 松 (pine), 柏 (cypress), 桃 (peach), 柳 (willow) - each with 木 on the left labeling the species.

phonetic

彡 shān

fine hairs; ornamental strokes (here phonetic + semantic)

Three strokes on the right - supplies the sound (shān → shān, exact). 彡 abstractly represents fine hairs, fur, or ornamental marks; here the three slanting strokes also evoke the cedar's needled foliage drooping in lines. So it doubles as a faint visual hint at the tree's appearance, not just a sound cue.