shū
noun #32,159

Meanings

  1. 1 vegetables

Examples

Duō chī shūcài yǒuyì jiànkāng.
Eating more vegetables is good for health.
Zhèlǐ de shūcài hěn xīnxiān.
The vegetables here are very fresh.

Tips

usage
Almost always paired as 蔬菜 (vegetables). Rarely used alone.

Components

radical
cǎo
grass; plant
The grass radical caps , marking it as a leafy edible plant. It anchors the meaning of vegetable and indexes with the whole plant family: greens, grass, flower, sprout, indigo plant.
phonetic
shū
sparse; to clear (here phonetic)
supplies the sound shū unchanged. It also lends a faint semantic flavour: means to clear out, dredge, or thin — and vegetables grow in rows that have been weeded and cleared. So reads almost as "plants in a tended plot". Same phonetic occasionally surfaces in comb.

Stroke Order

shū