chéng
noun #11,627

Measure Word

Meanings

  1. 1 orange (fruit)
  2. 2 orange (color)

Examples

HSK 4
Tā chuān le yī jiàn chéngsè de qúnzi.
She wore an orange dress.
HSK 7-9
Wǒ xǐhuān hē xiānzhà chéngzhī.
I like drinking freshly squeezed orange juice.

Tips

usage
on its own means the fruit or color. Common compounds: 橙子 (orange fruit), 橙色 (orange color), 橙汁 (orange juice).

Components

radical
wood; tree
Left - pictograph of a tree with branches above and roots below. As the indexing radical it places with other tree-and-fruit chars: peach, plum, pomelo, tangerine. The orange is a citrus fruit growing on trees, so the radical does literal semantic work.
phonetic
dēng
to climb; ascend (here phonetic)
Right supplies the sound - dēng drifting to chéng through the regular d/ch alternation seen in this phonetic family. Same component appears in stool, to step on, to stare wide-eyed. Borrowed purely for pronunciation, with no semantic link to the orange fruit or colour.

Stroke Order

chéng