shū
noun #32,159

Meanings

  1. 1 vegetables

Examples

HSK 4
Zhèlǐ de shūcài hěn xīnxiān.
The vegetables here are very fresh.
HSK 7-9
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
cǎo
grass; plant
The grass radical caps , marking it as a leafy edible plant. It anchors the meaning of vegetable and indexes with the whole plant family: greens, grass, flower, sprout, indigo plant.
phonetic
shū
sparse; to clear
supplies the sound shū unchanged. It also lends a faint semantic flavour: means to clear out, dredge, or thin, and vegetables grow in rows that have been weeded and cleared. So reads almost as 'plants in a tended plot'. The same phonetic occasionally surfaces in comb.

Stroke Order

shū