禽 (qín): birds; fowl (bound form)

Meanings

1 birds; fowl (bound form)
2 (literary) birds and animals
3 (old) variant of 擒 'to capture'

Characters

禽

qín

birds; fowl

Examples

家禽是指鸡、鸭、鹅这些被人饲养的鸟类。

Jiāqín shì zhǐ jī, yā, é zhèxiē bèi rén sìyǎng de niǎolèi.

'Domestic fowl' (jiāqín) refers to chickens, ducks, geese and other birds that humans raise.

他做的事简直禽兽不如。

Tā zuò de shì jiǎnzhí qínshòu bùrú.

What he did is worse than the beasts (lit. 'inferior even to birds and animals').

Tips

usage

Mostly seen as a bound morpheme in compounds rather than as a standalone word: 家禽 (jiāqín, 'poultry / domestic fowl'), 飞禽 (fēiqín, 'flying birds'), 禽流感 (qínliúgǎn, 'avian flu'), 禽兽 (qínshòu, 'beasts' — used as an insult). The classical sense was broader: in Pre-Qin texts, 禽 could mean both birds and four-legged animals together, before narrowing to 'birds' in modern usage.

memory

禽兽不如 (qínshòu bùrú, 'inferior to birds and beasts') is one of the strongest non-vulgar insults in Chinese — it accuses someone of having less moral worth than animals.

Components

radical

离 lí

to depart; mythical bird (here graphic)

Bottom 离 — the netted prey. The indexing Kangxi radical of 禽 is actually 禸 (the small footprint inside 离), the animal-track radical. The whole bottom reads as the bird trapped in the net, source of the 'fowl, captured creature' meaning.

semantic

人 rén

person (here a covering shape)

Top 人 — two strokes forming a peaked roof shape. Originally 禽 pictured a long-handled net for catching birds, and this top piece is the curved handle of the net. The 'person' reading is a modern visual match — no human in the etymology, just a net-frame.