正 (zhēng): first month of the lunar year (…

Meanings

1 first month of the lunar year (bound; used in 正月)

Characters

正

zhēng

first month of the lunar year (bound; used in 正月)

Examples

正月是一年中最热闹的时候。

Zhēngyuè shì yī nián zhōng zuì rènao de shíhou.

The first lunar month is the busiest time of the year.

元宵节在正月十五。

Yuánxiāojié zài zhēngyuè shíwǔ.

The Lantern Festival falls on the fifteenth of the first lunar month.

Tips

history

The first-tone reading zhēng survives only in calendar-month words. The standard explanation: when the Qin First Emperor Ying Zheng (嬴政) unified the writing system, his personal name was read zhèng, so the same character in the month-name 正月 was tone-shifted to zhēng to avoid the taboo. The pronunciation stuck for two thousand years even as the name-avoidance custom faded.

usage

Use zhēng only inside the bound calendar compounds 正月 (first lunar month), 正月十五 (Lantern Festival, the 15th of that month), and the archaic 新正 (new-year's first month). Anywhere else, including the unrelated 正在 or 正常, it stays as zhèng.

Components

radical

止 zhǐ

foot; stop

Bottom 止 depicts a foot/footprint and is the indexing radical. The foot moves straight toward the line above — 'going correctly, on the right path' — yielding 'correct, just, exactly, upright'. Family: 步 (step), 此 (here), 武 (military) — all foot-built.

ideograph

一 yī

one; horizontal line

Top horizontal functions as an abstract goal-line marker above the foot below — the destination the action aims at. Oracle-bone forms showed a foot marching toward a walled town or boundary; the line is what remains of that target.