What the Chinese heart is for?
The Chinese written alphabet is comprised of thousands of unique characters, each with their own pronunciation and distinctive meaning. Using these characters in conjunction with one another gives rise to new meaning. What’s poetic about Chinese phrases is that their meaning usually has twofold significance — functional meaning, as well as literal meaning.
It’ll be more straightforward if I were to just show it to you, so without further ado, take a look at these 9 terms formed with the Chinese character for heart:
- 開心 (kai-xin) — Happy:
The first character means “open”. The literal meaning for the Chinese term for happy is “open heart”. Happiness comes with an open heart!
- 傷心 (shang-xin) — Sad:
The first character is for “wound”, or “hurt”. Sadness? It might be stemming from a literal wound on your heart.
- 小心 (xiao-xin) — Careful:
The first character means “small” or “little”. The literal meaning is “small heart”. This interpretation might be a little of a stretch, but if there’s something that you have to take caution towards, you’ll want to proceed delicately, perhaps with small steps or careful movements. Building on to this term, another commonly used Chinese phrase is 小心眼 (xiao-xin-yan), which has the literal meaning of “careful eye”. It is a descriptor for a person that’s narrow-minded or nitpicky, one who is judgmental and levels a critical eye on the smallest, most trivial things.
- 虧心 (kui-xin) — Guilty:
The first word, “虧” means “loss”, or to lack something, such as in the term “吃虧” (chi-kui) means to be taken advantage of at a loss to oneself, while “虧本” (kui-ben) means to lose money. When put together with “heart”, the phrase comes to describe a person developing a negative, guilty conscience — literally losing their heart, or their morals — as the result of doing something bad or immoral.
- 無心 (wu-xin) — Unintentional; no mood:
“無“ means an absence, or quite literally “nothing”. Together with “心“, it means “lack of heart”, which is a pretty good explanation for its two meanings. You could have done something unintentionally, carelessly, without much heart or thought. Alternatively, you might not have the heart to do anything — no much of a mood, really.
- 黑心 (hei-xin) — Black-hearted:
The first character here is for the color “black”, and coincidentally, the literal meaning of this term is used in English as well. This term is a description for a person who is evil or cruel at heart.
- 熱心 (re-xin) — Eager:
“熱“ means “warmth”, or “hot”, so for this usage, the term literally means warm-hearted, in the way of being enthusiastic or excited for a particular thing.
- 費心 (fei-xin) — Take/Give effort to:
“費“ means “expense”, and can be used in conjunction with money, such as “費錢“ (fei-qian) for “costly”. In the case of “費心“ (fei-xin) here, the expense we’re talking about is one’s heart, meaning your time and effort. Therefore, this term is also often translated as “to go the trouble of”.
- 死心 (si-xin) — Give up:
For our final one, the slightly morbid one, with the first character of “死“ meaning “death”. To have a literal dead heart doesn’t mean dying, but it does mean giving up on something or somebody.
There are plenty more Chinese terms out there with the heart character as a component. Curious to learn? Check out our Chinese language course list here!