chéng
noun #11,627

Measure Word

一个

Meanings

  1. 1 orange (fruit)
  2. 2 orange (color)

Examples

Wǒ xǐhuān hē xiānzhà chéngzhī.
I like drinking freshly squeezed orange juice.
Tā chuān le yī jiàn chéngsè de qúnzi.
She wore an orange dress.

Tips

usage
on its own means the fruit or color. Common compounds: 橙子 (chéngzi, orange fruit), 橙色 (chéngsè, orange color), 橙汁 (chéngzhī, orange juice).

Components

radical
wood; tree
Left — pictograph of a tree with branches above and roots below. As the indexing radical it places with other tree-and-fruit chars: peach, plum, pomelo, tangerine. The orange is a citrus fruit growing on trees, so the radical does literal semantic work.
phonetic
dēng
to climb; ascend (here phonetic)
Right supplies the sound — dēng drifting to chéng through the regular d/ch alternation seen in this phonetic family. Same component appears in stool, to step on, to stare wide-eyed. Borrowed purely for pronunciation, with no semantic link to the orange fruit or colour.

Stroke Order

chéng