蔬

shū
noun #32,159

Meanings

  1. 1 vegetables

Examples

HSK 3
Zhèlǐ de shūcài hěn xīnxiān.
The vegetables here are very fresh.
HSK 5
Duō chī shūcài yǒuyì jiànkāng.
Eating more vegetables is good for health.

Tips

usage
Almost always paired as 蔬菜 (vegetables). Rarely used alone.

Components

radical
艹 cǎo
grass; plant
The grass radical caps 蔬, marking it as a leafy edible plant. It anchors the meaning of vegetable and indexes 蔬 with the whole plant family: 菜 greens, 草 grass, 花 flower, 苗 sprout, 蓝 indigo plant.
phonetic
疏 shū
sparse; to clear
疏 supplies the sound shū unchanged. It also lends a faint semantic flavour: 疏 means to clear out, dredge, or thin, and vegetables grow in rows that have been weeded and cleared. So 蔬 reads almost as 'plants in a tended plot'. The same phonetic occasionally surfaces in 梳 comb.

Stroke Order

蔬 shū