鸿

鴻

hóng

noun #36,768

Meanings

1 wild swan; bean goose
2 (literary) great; vast; grand

Characters

鸿

hóng

wild swan; great

Examples

鸿雁南飞，秋意已浓。

Hóng yàn nán fēi, qiū yì yǐ nóng.

The wild geese fly south — autumn is already deep.

他立下了鸿图大志。

Tā lì xià le hóng tú dàzhì.

He set himself a grand vision and lofty ambition.

Tips

culture

鸿 is the wild swan goose, an enduring symbol in classical poetry. Two famous uses: 鸿雁 (hóngyàn, wild geese — bringers of letters from afar) and the Sima Qian line 死有重于泰山，或轻于鸿毛 ('a death may weigh more than Mount Tai, or be lighter than a goose feather'), where 鸿毛 stands for the smallest possible weight.

memory

Compounds split cleanly: 'goose' sense → 鸿雁 (wild geese), 鸿毛 (goose down). 'Grand' sense → 鸿图 (grand plan), 鸿运 (great fortune), 鸿儒 (great scholar).

Components

radical

鸟 niǎo

bird

Right 鸟 — pictograph of a bird with crest, wing, and feet, the indexing radical placing 鸿 in the bird family with 鸡, 鸭, 鹅, 鹰. Specifically 鸿 names the large wild swan or bean goose; by literary extension it means 'vast, grand' — anything as sweeping as a flock of geese across the sky.

phonetic

江 jiāng

river; the Yangtze (here phonetic + semantic)

Left 江 — kept as one unit because it has a standalone reading. Inside 江 the right 工 supplies the sound (gōng → hóng via h/g alternation, same as 红 and 虹). The water meaning reinforces the picture of wild swans skimming a great river, a classical image for migrating geese in autumn.

Stroke Order

鸿 hóng

鸿