髓 (suǐ): marrow (bone)

Meanings

1 marrow (bone)
2 pith (botany)
3 innermost essence (figurative)

Characters

髓

suǐ

marrow; pith; innermost core

Examples

骨髓移植可以治疗某些血液病。

Gǔsuǐ yízhí kěyǐ zhìliáo mǒuxiē xuèyè bìng.

Bone marrow transplants can treat certain blood diseases.

他深得这门艺术的精髓。

Tā shēn dé zhè mén yìshù de jīngsuǐ.

He has deeply grasped the essence of this art form.

Tips

usage

髓 rarely appears alone; it is mostly a bound morpheme in compounds: 骨髓 (bone marrow), 精髓 (quintessence; essence), 脑髓 (brain matter). 精髓 is especially common as a formal expression for 'the core essence' of something.

Components

radical

骨 gǔ

bone

Left-side bone radical — a pictograph of a joint socket with flesh below, depicting the architecture of bone meeting tissue. Indexes 髓 in the skeletal family alongside 骼 skeleton, 髋 hip, 髁 condyle. Carries the meaning directly: 髓 is what lives inside bone — marrow, the soft generative core hidden in the hard shell.

phonetic

⺼ ròu

flesh (here phonetic-fused)

Right side is a fused phonetic unit: the visible bottom ⺼ flesh-strokes sit beneath earlier graphic strokes that historically formed 隋 minus 阝 — the suí phonetic. Standalone ⺼ has 4 strokes; here 12 because the sound-carrying strokes collapsed onto the flesh piece. Supplies suī shifted to suǐ.