刳
Character Story & Explanation
刳 is rarely used in spoken Mandarin but appears in classical literature, historical medical texts, and modern technical writing about craftsmanship or archaeology. It features in the *Zhuangzi* (c. 4th century BCE) describing 'hollowing out the mind' (刳心) as a Daoist practice—later cited by scholars like Guo Xiang. In Qing dynasty encyclopedias, 刳 describes boat-building: '刳木为舟' ('hollow out wood to make a boat'), a phrase still quoted in cultural education materials. Modern usage is largely literary or academic.
The character’s form has no pictographic origin—it evolved graphically from 句 + 刂 in seal script (c. 3rd century BCE), with 句 serving a phonetic role. Today, Chinese learners encounter it primarily in idioms like 刳木为舟 or in classical reading courses—not in daily conversation, but in contexts demanding lexical precision about removal and excavation.
Our detective begins at the crime scene: the character 刳 (kū), an 8-stroke verb meaning 'to cut open'. Its right-hand component 刂—the 'knife' radical—immediately signals surgical or incisive action. This isn’t a gentle slice; it’s deliberate, deep, and functional—like opening a cavity for inspection or extraction. The left side, 句 (jù), originally depicted a bent object (e.g., a hook or curved tool) in early seal script, later phonetically lending the *kū* sound. No pictographic 'open belly' survives—but the radical tells the truth: this is knife work.
Tracing its evolution, we find 刳 absent from oracle bone and bronze inscriptions. It first appears reliably in Warring States bamboo texts and Han dynasty dictionaries like the *Shuōwén Jiězì*, where Xu Shen defines it as ‘to hollow out’ (挖空), emphasizing removal of interior material—not just cutting skin, but excising core content. Its eight strokes follow strict order: horizontal, vertical, hook, then the knife radical’s two strokes—each movement calibrated for precision, mirroring its semantic weight.
Unlike common verbs like 切 (qiē, 'to cut') or 割 (gē, 'to sever'), 刳 implies intentionality and spatial consequence: you don’t 刳 air—you 刳 wood to make a boat, 刳 bamboo for a flute, or 刳 a tumor in classical medical texts. Its rarity today reflects specialization: modern Mandarin prefers 手术 (shǒushù, 'surgery') or 开刀 (kāidāo, 'to operate'), but 刳 persists in literary, historical, and technical registers where exactness matters—like Daoist cosmology describing the 'hollowing out' of ego to receive the Dao.
Example Sentences
Common Compounds
Similar Characters — Don't Mix These Up
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