noun #47,700

Meanings

  1. 1 the oak tree; Quercus

Examples

HSK 7-9
Zhè zuò shān shàng yǒu hěnduō lìshù, mùzhì jiānyìng nàiyòng.
There are many oak trees on this mountain; their wood is hard and durable.

Tips

history
is rarely used alone; in modern Chinese it appears in bound terms like 栎树 (oak tree) and 麻栎 (sawtooth oak). It also has a reading yuè used only in the old place name 栎阳.
culture
In Zhuangzi the social oak (栎社树) is so gnarled it is useless for timber - and so survives untouched. It became a classic image of the value of being 'useless'.

Components

radical
tree; wood
the tree radical marks this as a kind of tree - the oak.
phonetic
happy; music
(also read yuè 'music') gives the sound, here read lì. It is the simplified stand-in for the traditional phonetic in ; it carries no meaning in the oak word.

Stroke Order