齑 (jī) · finely minced pickled vegetables, ginger, or garlic

Meanings

1 finely minced pickled vegetables, ginger, or garlic
2 powdered; smashed to pieces

Characters

齑

jī

minced pickle (literary)

Examples

HSK 1

太学四年，朝齑暮盐。

Tàixué sìnián, zhāojīmùyán.

In four years at the imperial academy I ate minced pickle by day and salt by night.

HSK 6

吾村不齑粉乎！

Wú cūn bù jīfěn hū!

Wouldn't our village have been smashed to fragments!

Tips

register

jī is literary. Two related senses, both about being minced fine. (1) Food: a paste or pickle of finely chopped ginger, garlic, or pickled vegetable, once the staple condiment of impoverished students and monks. The phrase 朝齑暮盐 'minced pickle by morning, salt by evening' (from Han Yu's 《送穷文》) names a life of scholarly poverty. (2) Figurative: smashed to bits, ground to powder. 齑粉 'minced powder' = completely pulverised, as in 化为齑粉 'turned to dust'.

history

The set phrase 齑盐 (minced-pickle-and-salt) became the standard literary trope for the frugal life of the scholar, a humble diet that signalled moral seriousness rather than worldly success. Su Shi, Lu You, and other Song poets used it to claim virtuous poverty even when, by their own admission, they were not particularly poor.

Components

ideograph

齑 jī

minced pickle (literary)

Outer wrapping is 齐 (even / uniform, the Kangxi #210 indexing radical), supplying both the radical and the sound (qí to jī, regular palatal shift). Inner element is a contracted form historically derived from 韭 (leek), the prototypical condiment chopped fine. Together: 'leek chopped to an even fineness' = the classical minced-pickle dish. The traditional form 齏 shows the structure more fully; modern simplified 齑 contracts the inner element.

Filed under radical 齐 (qí, #210) by convention. 齐 is not a separate component in 齑, so no strokes are highlighted.