列克星敦 (liè kè xīng duì) — Lexington (place name, e.g., a city in Massachu…

Definition

noun

Lexington (place name, e.g., a city in Massachusetts, USA, or a famous ship)

列克星敦。
Qù nián shǔ jià wǒ hé jiā rén qù le liè kè xīng duì lǚ yóu.
Last summer vacation, I went to Lexington with my family.
列克星敦。
liè kè xīng duì Shì měi guó dú lì zhàn zhēng de yí gè zhòng yào dì diǎn.
Lexington is an important site of the American War of Independence.
列克星敦。
Lì shǐ kè shàng lǎo shī jiǎng le liè kè xīng duì zhàn yì de gù shi.
In history class, the teacher told the story of the Battle of Lexington.

Single-morpheme word

构词法gòucífǎ

音译yīnyìTransliteration

The characters spell the sound of a foreign word; their individual meanings play no part.

列克星敦 spells the foreign name Lexington; 列克星敦 carry no meaning of their own here.

Sound-only characters

Two or more meaningful parts placed together so that their meanings combine into a new one.

列 combines 歹, drawn as skeletal remains, and 刀, a knife, to depict tearing apart.

No reliable origin is recorded for this character.

Most characters — around four in five — are built this way: one part hints at the meaning, the other at the pronunciation.

The top of 星 is a later simplified form of 晶, twinkling stars; the bottom 生 shows the sound.

Two or more meaningful parts placed together so that their meanings combine into a new one.

The form behind 敦 combines 亯, an ancestral shrine, with 羊, a sheep, showing a cooked goat as a sacrifice.