Chinese

躺

tǎng
to lie face up; to recline
  • Phono-semantic compound 形聲
  • HSK 4
  • TOCFL 5
  • radical 身
  • 15 strokes

Etymology graph

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Origin

Phono-semantic compound (形聲 /形声, OC *tʰaːŋʔ): semantic 身 (“body”) + phonetic 尚 (OC *djaŋ, *djaŋs).

This word is first attested in the Yuan dynasty as 倘.

Many scholars connect this word to a relatively obscure character 踼／𰸄 (tǎng), glossed as 申足伏臥 (“to extend the legs and lie prostrate”) in the rime dictionary Jiyun (Chao et al., 1948; Zhengzhang, 2003).

Yang (2024) argues instead that this word comes from 挺 (tǐng, “to straighten; to lie flat”).

From Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Lineage

  • meaningChinese身 “body”
  • soundChinese尚 “still; yet”
    • meaningChinese八 “eight”
    • soundChinese向 “to face”
      • ideaChinese宀 “a type of deep house with walls on all four sides, a roof, a main hall, and back rooms”
      • ideaChinese口 “mouth, especially the lips and internal mouth cavity (Classifier: 把 c)”

Sources