xīn
noun #18,427

Meanings

  1. 1 zinc

Characters

Examples

HSK 4
Zhèzhǒng yàopiàn hányǒu xīn.
These pills contain zinc.
HSK 7-9
Xīn shì réntǐ bìxū de wēiliàng yuánsù.
Zinc is an essential trace element for the human body.

Components

radical
jīn
metal; gold (radical form of 金)
Left metal radical - side-form of , used for every metallic chemical element. is zinc, and like iron, copper, silver, it picks up the metal radical to mark its place in the periodic table.
phonetic
xīn
bitter; pungent (phonetic)
Right supplies the sound xīn with no shift - a tidy phonetic chosen when chemists coined a name for zinc. means 'bitter, pungent'; the meaning is unrelated to the metal, but the sound matched the German-derived 'Zink' perfectly.

Stroke Order

xīn