米奇 (mǐ jī) — Mickey (Mouse) | TongTong Chinese Dictionary

Definition

noun

Mickey (Mouse)

Measure word · 只

米奇。
Hái zi men dōu xǐ huan mǐ jī.
Children all like Mickey Mouse.
米奇。
Wǒ xiǎo shí hou jīng cháng kàn mǐ jī de dòng huà piàn.
When I was little, I often watched Mickey's cartoons.
，米奇。
Wǒ men qù dí shì ní lè yuán, hé mǐ jī pāi le yì zhāng zhào piàn.
We went to Disneyland and took a photo with Mickey.

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.

The characters 米 and 奇 carry no meaning of their own here; the word spells the English name Mickey.

Sound-only characters

A drawing of the thing itself, worn down over three thousand years into a few strokes.

米 is a picture of rice kernels without husk, with the horizontal stroke as a bamboo sieve. It is unrelated to similar-looking grain characters.

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

大可奇

Meaning part形符xíngfú

大大dàbig; great

Sound part声符shēngfú

可

The sound has drifted apartThe sound part was a clue two thousand years ago — it often still helps, but not always.

奇 pairs 大 (big; great) with 可, a sound part.

Appears in