莽 (mǎng): dense undergrowth; rank grass (…

Meanings

1 dense undergrowth; rank grass (bound form)
2 vast; boundless (literary)
3 boorish; reckless; impetuous (bound form)

Characters

莽

mǎng

dense grass; reckless

Examples

这片土地一片莽原。

Zhè piàn tǔdì yípiàn mǎng yuán.

This stretch of land is wild grassland.

他做事太莽，常常惹麻烦。

Tā zuòshì tài mǎng, chángcháng rěmáfan.

He acts too rashly, and often gets into trouble.

Tips

usage

莽 rarely stands alone in modern Chinese — it lives mostly in compounds: 莽原 (wild grassland), 草莽 (the wilds; lawless lands), 鲁莽 (lǔmǎng, reckless), 莽汉 (a brutish guy), 莽撞 (rash). On its own it has a literary feel.

memory

The 艹 (grass) radical on top hints at the original meaning: thick, untamed grass. From there it stretched metaphorically to "wild and lawless" → "a reckless person." Same logic as English "rough" going from terrain to behavior.

Components

radical

艹 cǎo

grass; vegetation

艹 is the top grass radical (the cap form of 草). It marks 莽 as a vegetation word and supplies the upper layer of grass in a vivid compound ideograph: a dog crashing through dense undergrowth. Family: 草 (grass), 花 (flower), 茂 (luxuriant), 葬 (bury, hidden in grass).

semantic

犬 quǎn

dog

犬 (full-form dog, not the side-radical 犭) sits in the middle — a hound bounding through the grass. The picture as a whole gave 莽 its core senses: tall wild grass, then by extension a wild, reckless person (莽撞) crashing through life like a dog through bushes.

semantic

廾 gǒng

two hands joined

廾 at the bottom is the joined-hands graph (two arms reaching upward). Some analyses read it as more grass framing the dog; others see it as remnant of an original four-grass frame around a buried 犬 — a hunter releasing the dog into brush. Either way it closes the scene.