Definitions

chēng deep red

Etymology

About

is a phono-semantic compound character denoting a light shade of red or a reddish hue, originally describing the color of certain fish or a blushing face. It pairs the semantic radical (chì, 'red'), which anchors the meaning in the color category, with the phonetic component (zhēn) that indicates the pronunciation. The traditional counterpart retains the unsimplified phonetic (zhēn) and carries exactly the same meaning, with the only difference being the simplified versus traditional form of the phonetic component.