One character a day, easy to master Chinese characters. Let’s take a look at the basic knowledge of “蛛”.
蛛 zhū | |
Explnantion: spider | |
Phrases: 蜘蛛zhī zhū:spider |
In the bronze inscriptions, “zhu” (“蛛”) is a pictographic character that looks like a small insect spreading its legs; In the small seal script, a archaic phonetic element “ ” is added, making it a pictophonetic character. The change indicates the separation of this kind of insect from all others; in the regular script, the character is simply written as “蛛”, with the phonetic element “zhu” (“朱”) on the right, and the semantic element “chong” (“虫”, meaning “an insect”) on the left, indicating that the spider was believed to be a kind of insect.
The spider is an arthropod that can produce a sticky liquid from its tail for making a web to catch insects. It’s characterized by a small body, eight long and thin legs and the ability to produce silk and to make webs. There’s a Chinese idiom “zhusi maji”, literally “a spider’s web and a horse’s footprints”. It means that by tracing a spider’s web, you can find the location of the spider; and by tracing the footprints of a horse, you know where the horse is gone. The idiom describes tiny clues of something.
屋子的角落里挂了很多蜘蛛网。
There were a lot of spider webs in the corner of the room.