灶 (zào): kitchen stove

Measure Word

一个灶 gè

Meanings

1 kitchen stove
2 cooking hearth
3 mess / canteen (military or institutional)

Characters

灶

zào

stove / hearth

Examples

妈妈在灶上煮了一锅粥。

Māma zài zào shàng zhǔ le yīguōzhōu.

Mom cooked a pot of congee on the stove.

农村的老式灶用柴火烧饭。

Nóngcūn de lǎoshì zào yòng cháihuǒ shāo fàn.

Old-fashioned rural stoves cook food with firewood.

Tips

culture

The 灶王爷 (Kitchen God, Zào Wáng Yé) is a deity worshipped in Chinese homes. He watches over the family from his post at the kitchen stove and reports to the Jade Emperor at the end of each year. On the 23rd day of the 12th lunar month, families perform a send-off ceremony, often offering sweet foods to make his report sweet.

Components

radical

火 huǒ

fire (radical)

Left fire radical — the indexing radical, pictures flames licking upward. Anchors 灶 in the heat/cooking family with 炉 stove, 烧 to burn, 炒 to stir-fry. The kitchen stove is fundamentally a controlled fire, and the radical announces this from the first stroke.

semantic

土 tǔ

earth; soil

Right 土 contributes meaning, not sound — a compound ideograph reading 'fire on earth'. The traditional Chinese stove was a clay or packed-earth structure with a fire-chamber inside, exactly what 火 + 土 depicts. The Kitchen God 灶王爷 still presides over this earthen hearth in folk religion.