gōng
noun #34,071

Meanings

  1. 1 upper arm
  2. 2 the arm from elbow to shoulder (anatomical/literary)

Examples

Tā de gōng èrtóujī hěn fādá.
His biceps (literally 'upper-arm two-headed muscle') are well-developed.
Qū gōng ér zhěn zhī.
He bent his arm and used it as a pillow. (Analects of Confucius)

Tips

history
Famously appears in 《论语》: 饮水其中 — 'Coarse rice for food, water to drink, my bent arm for a pillow — joy is found even in this.' Confucius's line on contentment with simple living. Today mostly survives in anatomical terms like 二头肌 (biceps) and (humerus).

Components

radical
ròu
meat; flesh (radical form)
Left meat-flesh radical — the indexing radical (visually identical to moon but a different semantic source). Marks as anatomical, placing it among body-part chars like chest, shoulder, wrist. The whole entry names a specific arm segment.
phonetic
gōng
bent arm (here phonetic)
Right supplies the sound gōng (exact match) and originally depicted a bent arm — the very limb segment names. So the pairing is doubled: flesh + bent-arm graph = the upper-arm flesh, from elbow to shoulder. rarely appears standalone today, surviving mainly as this phonetic.

Stroke Order

gōng