肱

gōng
noun #34,071

Meanings

  1. 1 upper arm
  2. 2 the arm from elbow to shoulder (anatomical/literary)

Examples

HSK 7-9
Tā de gōng èrtóujī hěn fādá.
His biceps (literally 'upper-arm two-headed muscle') are well-developed.
HSK 7-9
Qū gōng ér zhěn zhī.
He bent his arm and used it as a pillow. (Analects of Confucius)

Tips

history
Famously appears in 《论语》: 饭疏食饮水,曲肱而枕之,乐亦在其中矣 - 'Coarse rice for food, water to drink, my bent arm for a pillow - joy is found even in this.' Confucius's line on contentment with simple living. Today 肱 mostly survives in anatomical terms like 肱二头肌 (biceps) and 肱骨 (humerus).

Components

radical
⺼ ròu
meat; flesh (radical form)
Left meat-flesh radical - the indexing radical (visually identical to 月 moon but a different semantic source). Marks 肱 as anatomical, placing it among body-part chars like 胸 chest, 肩 shoulder, 腕 wrist. The whole entry names a specific arm segment.
phonetic
厷 gōng
bent arm (phonetic)
Right 厷 supplies the sound gōng (exact match) and originally depicted a bent arm - the very limb segment 肱 names. So the pairing is doubled: flesh + bent-arm graph = the upper-arm flesh, from elbow to shoulder. 厷 rarely appears standalone today, surviving mainly as this phonetic.

Stroke Order

肱 gōng