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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

餐

cān
to eat
  • Phono-semantic compound 形聲
  • HSK 6
  • TOCFL 3
  • radical 食
  • 16 strokes

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Origin

Phono-semantic compound (形聲 /形声, OC *sʰaːn): phonetic 𣦼 (cán) + semantic 食 (“to eat; meal; food”). Its original meaning was "to swallow".

From Proto-Sino-Tibetan *m-dz(j)a-k/n/t/s (“to eat; food; to feed; rice”), whence Tibetan ཟ (za, “to eat”); probably also related to 咀 (OC *ʔsaʔ, *zaʔ, “to chew”) (STEDT; Benedict, 1972; Schuessler, 2007).

Alternatively, it may be compared to Tibetan འཚལ ('tshal, “to eat”), ཚལ་མ (tshal ma, “breakfast”) (Coblin, 1986; Schuessler, 2007; Hill, 2019).

From Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Lineage

  • inheritedProto-Sino-Tibetan*m-dz(j)a-k/n/t/s “to eat; food; to feed; rice”
  • soundChinese𣦼
  • meaningChinese食 “to eat; to have a meal; to take in”
    • 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: Tibetan ཟ, Tibetan འཚལ

Words built on it: 午餐, 早餐, 晚餐, 中餐, 西餐

Meanings

character
  1. to eat
  2. meal
  3. cuisine; (type of) food
  4. Classifier for meals.
  5. Classifier for beatings, scoldings, etc.

Shuowen Jiezi 說文解字

餐：吞也，从食𣦼声。

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

國語辭典 definitions

  1. 食物、飯食。 例：早餐、西餐
  2. 吃、食。 例：聚餐、野餐、飽餐一頓
  3. 量詞。計算飲食次數的單位。 例：一天三餐飯

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

How 餐 was written 字形演變

  1. 餐 in Small seal script
    Small seal
    說文小篆
    Shuowen, c. 100 CE
  2. 餐 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: 餐