鹳 (guàn): stork

Measure Word

一只鹳 zhī

Meanings

1 stork
2 crane (a long-legged wading bird)

Characters

鹳

guàn

stork

Examples

湿地公园里有一只白鹳在觅食。

Shīdì gōngyuán lǐ yǒu yī zhī bái guàn zài mìshí.

There's a white stork foraging in the wetland park.

黑鹳是国家一级保护动物。

Hēi guàn shì guójiā yījí bǎohù dòngwù.

The black stork is a Class I nationally protected species.

Tips

memory

The right side of 鹳 is 鸟 (bird) — that's your category clue. The left side 雚 also appears in 灌, 罐, 观 — all carrying the 'guan' sound. Most famous appearance in classical Chinese: 王之涣's 《登鹳雀楼》 ('Climbing Stork Tower'), one of the most-memorized Tang poems.

Components

radical

鸟 niǎo

bird

Right side 鸟 bird is the indexing radical, the simplified form of 鳥. It files 鹳 in the bird section with 鸡 chicken, 鸭 duck, 鹤 crane. Storks are long-legged wading birds, and the radical confirms the avian identity that the older 雚 graph implied.

phonetic

雚 guàn

heron; old bird-name graph

Left side 雚 is the ancient pictograph for a heron-like bird — two big eyes (the doubled 口) over a short-tailed bird (隹). It supplies the guàn sound exactly. When the graph drifted toward other meanings, 鹳 added the bird radical to clarify the original heron-and-stork sense.