noun #11,277

Meanings

  1. 1 skull
  2. 2 cranium
  3. 3 forehead

Examples

Yīshēng jiǎnchá le tā de lúgǔ.
The doctor examined his skull.
Zhège shǒushù xūyào dǎkāi lú qiāng.
This surgery requires opening the cranial cavity.

Tips

usage
rarely appears alone in modern Chinese. Common compounds: 颅骨 (skull bone), (cranial cavity), 头颅 (head/skull).

Components

radical
head; page (radical)
Right-side head radical — originally pictured a head set on a body with three lines of hair on top, now flattened into the simplified six-stroke . The indexing radical here, supplying the meaning: names the skull or cranium. The radical anchors in the head-and-face family along with crown, neck, forehead, cheek.
phonetic
household; black (here phonetic)
Left side supplies the sound — lú read straight across with no shift. The traditional form used a much fuller phonetic above this simplified silhouette; the modern shape compresses to 5 strokes while keeping the same purely phonetic role. Same phonetic appears in stove, hut, reed — all sharing the lú reading.

Stroke Order