色 (shǎi): color (colloquial spoken form)

Meanings

1 color (colloquial spoken form)
2 used in 色子 (shǎizi) dice

Characters

色

shǎi

color (colloquial spoken form)

Examples

扔个色子看看你的运气。

Rēng ge shǎizi kànkan nǐ de yùnqi.

Roll the dice and let's see your luck.

这件衬衫洗了几次就掉色了。

Zhè jiàn chènshān xǐ le jǐ cì jiù diàoshǎi le.

This shirt has faded after a few washes.

Tips

register

The shǎi reading is strictly colloquial and very narrow. Its anchor word is 色子 (dice — the gambling cube). In casual northern speech you'll also hear 掉色 (to lose color, of clothes or paint), though the standard reading there is diàosè. Everywhere else in the language, 色 is sè.

Components

ideograph

色 shǎi

facial expression; color

Indivisible six-stroke unit, indexed as its own Kangxi radical #139. Treat as a single abstract whole carrying the chain face-complexion → expression → hue → visible appearance. Historically depicted one person bending close over another, said to picture intimacy and the flush it brings to the face — from which 'color' generalised.

Radical

Color Kangxi #139

The color radical. The original sense was facial expression — what shows on a person's face — which then extended to 'color' generally. Indexes very few characters (艳 'glamorous' is the main resident). Mostly important as a free morpheme: it forms the suffix in every modern color word.