菜

cài · coi3

vegetable; dish

Where it comes from

菜 is a sound-and-meaning character. 艹, the grass or plant sign at the top, points to edible plants; 采 below supplied the historical sound clue. 采 itself once pictured a hand gathering from a plant, which also makes the whole form memorable, but that visual connection is not the character’s complete scholarly derivation. 菜 is not securely attested in oracle-bone script, so this hand-drawn old-style form shows its established plant-over-采 structure rather than claiming a prehistoric vegetable picture.

A piece of culture

Vegetables and a whole dish
菜 can mean a vegetable, but it can also mean a prepared dish. 家常菜 means “home-style cooking”: jiāchángcài in Mandarin and gaa1 soeng4 coi3 in Cantonese. The phrase is not one fixed recipe. It evokes the familiar dishes a household cooks regularly — food shaped by region, season and family taste.

Use it in a real word

家常菜

jiāchángcài · gaa1 soeng4 coi3

home-style cooking; everyday family dishes

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More characters

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