chuáng
noun HSK 1 #516

Measure Word

zhāng

Meanings

  1. 1 bed

Characters

广 (shelter) + (wood) — wooden frame under a roof

Examples

Wǒ de chuáng hěn dà.
My bed is very big.
床上
Tā zài chuángshàng kàn shū.
He is reading in bed.

Tips

grammar
The measure word for beds is , the same one used for flat things like tables, paper, and tickets.
culture
Li Bai's famous poem 'Quiet Night Thoughts' begins with 床前明月光 — 'Before my bed, bright moonlight.'

Components

radical
广 yǎn
lean-to; shelter
The 'shelter' radical wraps the top-left — a side-view of a roof leaning against a wall. It indexes in the building/place family alongside shop, warehouse, courtyard, village. It signals 'something kept indoors under a roof.'
semantic
wood; tree
Inside sits 'wood' — a pictograph of a tree, here naming the material the bed is made from. Shelter + wood = the wooden frame you sleep on indoors. The compound is purely semantic, no phonetic. Same shelter-over-wood logic appears in many simple nouns; here it gives the directly readable 'wooden-thing-under-a-roof' = bed.

In Pop Culture

明月 Chuáng qián míngyuè guāng
Before my bed, bright moonlight
Opening line of Li Bai's 静夜思 (Quiet Night Thoughts).

Stroke Order

chuáng