正 (zhēng): first month of the lunar year (…

Meanings

1 first month of the lunar year (bound; used in 正月)

Characters

正

zhēng

first month of the lunar year (bound; used in 正月)

Examples

HSK 4

正月是一年中最热闹的时候。

Zhēngyuè shì yī nián zhōng zuì rènao de shíhou.

The first lunar month is the busiest time of the year.

HSK 7-9

元宵节在正月十五。

Yuánxiāojié zài zhēngyuè shíwǔ.

The Lantern Festival falls on the fifteenth of the first lunar month.

Tips

history

The first-tone reading zhēng survives only in calendar-month words. The standard explanation: when the Qin First Emperor Ying Zheng (嬴政) unified the writing system, his personal name was read zhèng, so the same character in the month-name 正月 was tone-shifted to zhēng to avoid the taboo. The pronunciation stuck for two thousand years even as the name-avoidance custom faded.

usage

Use zhēng only inside the bound calendar compounds 正月 (first lunar month), 正月十五 (Lantern Festival, the 15th of that month), and the archaic 新正 (new-year's first month). Anywhere else, including the unrelated 正在 or 正常, it stays as zhèng.

Components

radical

止 zhǐ

foot; stop

Bottom 止 depicts a foot/footprint and is the indexing radical. The foot moves straight toward the line above - 'going correctly, on the right path' - yielding 'correct, just, exactly, upright'. Family: 步 (step), 此 (here), 武 (military) - all foot-built.

ideograph

一 yī

one; horizontal line

Top horizontal functions as an abstract goal-line marker above the foot below - the destination the action aims at. Oracle-bone forms showed a foot marching toward a walled town or boundary; the line is what remains of that target.