鸟 (diǎo) · variant of 屌, penis

Meanings

1 variant of 屌
2 penis

Characters

鸟

diǎo

variant of 屌

Examples

HSK 3

别说这种鸟话。

Bié shuō zhèzhǒng diǎo huà.

Don't talk such damned nonsense.

HSK 5

你搞什么鸟？

Nǐ gǎo shénme diǎo?

What the hell are you up to?

Tips

register

Highly vulgar - a taboo-loan reading where 鸟 stands in for the homophonous 屌. Pervasive in Ming-Qing vernacular novels (Water Margin, Journey to the West) where characters bark 鸟人 'damned guy' or 鸟事 'shitty business'. In modern Mandarin the bare noun is largely archaic; today's slang uses 屌 directly.

history

The diǎo reading is a taboo-driven phonetic loan: writers swapped in the bird character to avoid putting the cruder 屌 on the page. The dodge is so well-established that traditional dictionaries list it as a formal alternate reading rather than a typo.

Components

pictograph

鸟 diǎo

bird

Pictograph of a bird in profile - top stroke is the beak, the curved upper strokes form the head and back, the inner dot marks the eye, and the bottom hook traces a talon. Simplified from 11-stroke 鳥 (whose bottom 灬 was tail feathers, not fire). Kangxi #196, indexing most bird chars: 鸡 chicken, 鸭 duck, 鸽 pigeon, 鹰 eagle.

Radical

Bird Kangxi #196

The long-tailed bird radical, contrast with 隹 (short-tailed). Highly productive - Chinese names most birds with 鸟 plus a phonetic: 鸡 (chicken), 鸭 (duck), 鹅 (goose), 鸽 (pigeon), 鹰 (eagle), 鹤 (crane), 鹊 (magpie). Usually positioned on the right; simplified 鸟 has 5 strokes, traditional 鳥 has 11.