méng
verb #19,985

Meanings

  1. 1 to sprout
  2. 2 to bud
  3. 3 to germinate
  4. 4 (colloquial) cute / adorable / moe

Examples

Chūntiān lái le, shùmù kāishǐ méngyá.
Spring has arrived and the trees are beginning to sprout buds.
Zhè zhī xiǎo māo tài méng le!
This little kitten is so cute!

Tips

culture
The 'cute' meaning of entered Chinese internet culture through the Japanese anime fandom concept え (moe) — a warm feeling of affection towards a character. It is now widely used in everyday Chinese to mean cute or adorable, especially for animals, babies, and anime characters.

Components

radical
cǎo
grass; plant (top radical)
Top grass radical — the 3-stroke compressed form of . The indexing radical, files in the botanical family of flower, grass, seedling, sprout. Marks sprouting / budding as a plant action, the original sense before the modern colloquial meaning 'cute / moe' was borrowed from Japanese internet slang.
phonetic
míng
bright (sun + moon)
Below supplies the sound — míng shifting to méng with rime change. itself is sun () + moon (), the classic compound ideograph for brightness. In it gives the reading while also adding a faint semantic flavor: a plant breaking through to the bright light, fitting the 'sprout / emerge into view' meaning.

Stroke Order

méng