芝士 (zhī shì) — cheese | TongTong Chinese Dictionary

Definition

noun

cheese

Measure word · 块

芝士。
Wǒ mǎi le yí kuài zhī shì.
I bought a piece of cheese.
芝士。
Zhè zhǒng zhī shì de wèi dào hěn hǎo.
This kind of cheese tastes very good.
芝士。
Miàn bāo shàng jiā le yì diǎn zhī shì.
I added a bit of cheese on the bread.

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 芝 and 士 carry no meaning of their own here; 芝士 spells the foreign word for cheese.

Sound-only characters

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

艹之芝

Meaning part形符xíngfú

艹Written in full as艸cǎograss

Sound part声符shēngfú

之

之zhī芝⁰zhī

Same sound today

芝 is built from 艹, a grass form, plus 之 as a sound part; it names a type of plant.

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

The shape 士 comes from a simple drawing of a war axe. The character later came to mean a soldier, officer, or intellectual.

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