shì
verb #9,839

Meanings

  1. 1 to pass away; to die (literary)
  2. 2 to elapse; to pass (of time)

Examples

HSK 3
Tā de fùqīn yǐjīng shìshì le.
His father has passed away.
HSK 5
Shíguāng fēishì.
Time flies by.
HSK 7-9
Shìqù de qīngchūn yīqù-bùfǎn.
Lost youth never returns.

Tips

register
is literary and respectful - used for dignified references to death (逝世) or poetic descriptions of passing time (飞逝). Never used casually.
history
From Confucius's famous line 逝者如斯夫 - 'What passes is like this river, flowing day and night' - one of the most quoted lines in classical Chinese.

Components

radical
chuò
walk; go
is the motion radical in its bottom-left walking form, anchoring in the family of going-and-passing verbs (, , 退, ). It signals the literal movement of time slipping by - the soul departs, the river flows on.
phonetic
zhé
to break; to snap
supplies the sound - final shifted from zhé to shì but the rhyme group still rings. Its sense of snapping or breaking off colours with the feeling of a clean rupture: time, life, or moments break away and travel out of reach.

Stroke Order

shì