noun #14,054

Meanings

  1. 1 (bound form) spine; backbone
  2. 2 (bound form) ridge

Examples

Tā de jǐzhuī shòushāng le.
His spine was injured.
Wūjǐ shàng luò le yī zhī niǎo.
A bird landed on the roof ridge.

Tips

usage
is a bound morpheme — it does not stand alone in modern Chinese. Common compounds: 脊椎 (jǐzhuī, spine), 脊背 (jǐbèi, back), 脊梁 (jǐliang, backbone), 屋脊 (wūjǐ, roof ridge), 山脊 (shānjǐ, mountain ridge).

Components

radical
ròu
meat; flesh (radical form)
Bottom is the meat radical, the body-tissue form of (not the moon it looks identical to). It signals that names a body part, the spine or backbone. Same flesh radical groups with liver, brain, waist, leg, back.
semantic
rén
person; vertebra-shape
Top portion is a doubled set of vertebra marks arranged around a central spine — two human-like figures in mirror symmetry, picturing the stacked bones of the backbone. The whole upper graphic is one fused semantic unit, read here as a vertebra ideograph anchored on .

Stroke Order