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Etymology data from Wiktionary via Wiktextract (CC BY-SA 4.0). Chinese character data from the 說文解字, the Taiwan MOE 國語辭典簡編本 (CC BY-ND 3.0 TW) and HSK/TOCFL lists.

Explanations are written by a local model (gemma4) and only published after a verification pass against the cited sources. How it works.

Chinese

食

shí
to eat; to have a meal; to take in
  • Ideogrammatic compound 會意
  • HSK 2
  • radical 食
  • 9 strokes

Etymology graph

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  • borrowed
  • derived
  • parts
  • meaning component
  • sound component
  • related
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Origin

Etymology 1

Ideogrammic compound (會意 /会意): 亼 (“mouth”) + 皀 (“a bowl of rice on a stand”). In the modern form, the bowl of rice has corrupted into the similar but unrelated 良 or 艮. The variant form 𠊊 preserves the original composition.

Shuowen interprets the 亼 as a phonetic component.

From Proto-Sino-Tibetan *mə-l(j)ək.

Etymology 2

The *s- causative of Etymology 1.

Etymology 3

Kwok (2018) reconstructs Proto-Southern Min *tsiaʔ⁸ and tentatively reconstructs Proto-Min *dziak (in Norman's system).

While often considered as the vernacular counterpart to etymology 1, it is unlikely to be related to etymology 1 (Norman, 1991; Klöter, 2005; Fuehrer and Yang, 2014). Schuessler (2007) suggests it derives from 嚼 (“to chew”) (probably based on Norman's unpublished manuscripts).

From Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Lineage

  • inheritedProto-Sino-Tibetan*mə-l(j)ək
  • ideaChinese亼 “mouth”
    • ideaChinese入 “to enter; to go into”
    • ideaChinese一 “one”
  • ideaChinese皀 “Prepared food, a vessel full of food (as in 即 and 既, in which is simplified)”

Related: Proto-Min *dziak

Words built on it: 飯, 餓, 食物, 飽, 養, 食品, 館, 美食, 餘, 餅, 餐

Meanings

character
  1. to eat; to have a meal; to take in
  2. to drink
  3. to take in; to inhale; to smoke
  4. to consume; to use up
  5. to extract; to extort; to absorb; to swallow
  6. to absorb; to get into; to enter; to be stuck inside

Shuowen Jiezi 說文解字

食：一米也。从皀亼聲。或說亼皀也。凡食之屬皆从食。

Xu Shen, c. 100 CE — the first analytical dictionary of Chinese characters.

國語辭典 definitions

  1. 人名用字。如漢代有酈食其。

© Ministry of Education, Taiwan — CC BY-ND 3.0 TW, shown unaltered.

How 食 was written 字形演變

  1. 食 in Oracle bone script
    Oracle bone
    甲骨文
    Shang, c. 1250–1050 BCE
  2. 食 in Bronze script
    Bronze
    金文
    Shang–Zhou
  3. 食 in Chu slips & silk script
    Chu slips & silk
    楚系簡帛
    Warring States
  4. 食 in Qin slips script
    Qin slips
    秦系簡牘
    Qin
  5. 食 in Small seal script
    Small seal
    說文小篆
    Shuowen, c. 100 CE
  6. 食 in Regular script
    Regular
    楷書
    since c. 200 CE

Historical forms collected by the legacy etymfun dataset; most characters have several attested variants.

Sources

  • Historical glyph forms (zdic.net 字形演变) — Rights unverified
  • HSK / TOCFL word lists — Facts (levels)
  • 教育部《國語辭典簡編本》 (Taiwan MOE) — CC BY-ND 3.0 TW
  • 說文解字 Shuowen Jiezi (Xu Shen, c. 100 CE) — Public domain
  • Written form — n/a
  • Wiktionary (via Wiktextract / kaikki.org) — CC BY-SA 4.0
  • Wiktionary: 食