hān
adjective

Meanings

  1. 1 thick; stout; coarse (dialectal)
  2. 2 dawdling; muddle-headed (literary)

Examples

Tā kǎn le yī gēn hānshí de gùnzi dāng guǎizhàng.
He cut a thick, solid stick to use as a walking staff.
颟顸干活
Bié mānhān de gàn huó.
Don't muddle through your work like that.

Tips

usage
Two living compounds. (1) 颟顸 — 'muddle-headed / sloppy / careless in handling things', a classic Lu Xun-era vocabulary word for bureaucratic incompetence. (2) 顸实 — dialect / colloquial 'thick and solid' (of a stick, rope, neck). Northern speech only.
register
Northern dialectal and literary. 颟顸 is used in essays and political satire ('our bureaucracy is 颟顸'); the 顸实 sense is regional and informal.

Components

radical
head; page
Right (Kangxi #181, head) — the head-radical anchors the original sense: a thick or muddle 'head' = stout / dull-witted. Same radical drives (its partner in ), , , .
phonetic
gān
dry; trunk (here phonetic)
Left supplies the sound (gān → hān, dental shift). Same phonetic in and , which preserve the h-initial.

Stroke Order

hān