zhù
noun

Meanings

  1. 1 (literary) chopsticks

Examples

放下筷子口气吃不下
Tā fàngxià kuàizi, tàn le kǒuqì, chī bú xià.
He set down his chopsticks and sighed, unable to eat.

Tips

history
is the old word for chopsticks, replaced in modern Chinese by 筷子. 'Kuai' was adopted by boatmen who avoided the homophone of (to stop), unlucky on a boat. survives in classical poetry like Li Bai's lines and in Japanese, but not in modern speech.
register
Literary and archaic. Use 筷子 in modern Chinese.

Components

radical
zhú
bamboo
The bamboo-cap radical ⺮ (the top form of ) marks as a bamboo implement and is its indexing radical, since chopsticks were made of bamboo.
phonetic
zhě
one who; (here) phonetic
The element supplies the sound for ; it is purely phonetic, with the reading drifted from the modern value.

Stroke Order

zhù