About
The character 栀, whose traditional form is 梔, is a phono-semantic compound with the wood radical 木 signifying its botanical category and the component 巵 acting as a phonetic indicator for the pronunciation zhī, which in the simplified form is written as 卮. This character has historically denoted the gardenia plant, specifically Gardenia jasminoides, and its usage in written Chinese has been consistently specific to this plant, encompassing references to its flowers, fruits, and employments in domains such as traditional medicine without substantive semantic expansion or alteration.
Etymology Hide
