床

chuáng
noun HSK 2 #516

Measure Word

一张床 zhāng

Meanings

  1. 1 bed
  2. 2 measure word for quilts and blankets

Characters

广 (shelter) + 木 (wood) - wooden frame under a roof

Examples

HSK 1
Wǒ de chuáng hěn dà.
My bed is very big.
HSK 1
Mèimei zuò zài chuáng biān kàn shū.
My younger sister sits on the edge of the bed reading.
HSK 5
Dōngtiān wǒ yào gài liǎng chuáng bèizi.
In winter I need two quilts.

Tips

grammar
The measure word for beds is 张, 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 床 in the building/place family alongside 店 shop, 库 warehouse, 庭 courtyard, 庄 village. It signals 'something kept indoors under a roof.'
semantic
木 mù
wood; tree
Inside sits 木 '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

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

Stroke Order

床 chuáng