noun

Measure Word

tiáo

Meanings

  1. 1 goonch catfish (genus Bagarius)
  2. 2 a large predatory catfish of South and Southeast Asian rivers

Examples

HSK 7-9
Pī shì nányà héliú zhōng tǐxíng zuì dà de nián yú zhīyī.
The goonch is one of the largest catfish in South Asian rivers.
HSK 7-9
Zhōngguó Yúnnán de Lán cāng Jiāng lǐ yě yǒu pī fēnbù.
The goonch is also found in the Lancang River in Yunnan, China.

Tips

usage
A single-character fish name; the radical gives the category and the sound. English anglers know the goonch from lurid stories on the Kali River in India - a very real giant bagrid that can grow past two metres and ambushes prey in strong currents.

Components

radical
fish
Left fish radical, simplified from (the four-dot tail compressed to a single horizontal stroke). It indexes in the fish-name family: carp, shark, whale, eel. Any character with on the left names a specific fish species - and is the goonch catfish, a giant predatory bagrid of South Asian rivers.
phonetic
great
Right side supplies the sound directly: pī. Same phonetic appears in unfired brick, embryo, surname Pi. itself is with an added horizontal, an archaic graph that meant 'great, vast' - a faint fit for the goonch's reputation as one of the largest freshwater catfish, easily over two meters long.

No stroke data for ; the glyph shown is your device font, so component strokes can't be highlighted.

Stroke Order