喱
Character Story & Explanation
喱 is primarily used in Greater China’s informal transliteration of the metric unit 'liter' — especially in Hong Kong, Macau, and pre-1990s Taiwan. You’ll see it on beverage labels (e.g., '300喱' = 300 ml), pharmacy prescriptions, and vintage advertisements. It is *not* used for 'grain'; that meaning belongs exclusively to 粒 (lì). No classical texts, idioms, or modern compounds use 喱 to denote cereal grains or agricultural produce.
The character 喱 is a phonetic-semantic compound: 口 (radical, indicating speech/sound) + 利 (lì, phonetic component, approximating 'li'). It was created in the late 19th/early 20th century as a localized phonetic borrowing for 'litre', not as a native semantic character. Its form has no ancient pictographic origin — it is a modern coinage, not found in oracle bone, bronze, or seal scripts.
The character 喱 (lí) is not a standard modern Chinese character with the meaning 'grain'. In fact, it does not appear in authoritative dictionaries such as the Xiandai Hanyu Cidian (7th ed.), the Guoyu Cidian, or the official HSK vocabulary lists. It is absent from the GB2312, GBK, and Unicode CJK Unified Ideographs core sets as a semantically independent character. Its inclusion in some legacy or variant font sets is rare and non-standard.
This character is frequently confused with 粒 (lì), which *does* mean 'grain' or 'particle' — a common, HSK Level 4 character with radical 米 (rice) and 11 strokes. The confusion likely arises from visual similarity: both contain 口 (mouth) and share phonetic components, but 喱 lacks historical attestation as a grain-related logograph in classical or modern usage.
In contemporary Chinese, 喱 appears almost exclusively as a phonetic loan in transliterations of foreign words — notably the English unit 'liter' (e.g., 'litre'), especially in older Hong Kong and Macau signage (e.g., '喱水' for 'litre of water'). It is never used independently to mean 'grain', nor does it belong to any standard HSK level. Learners should prioritize 粒 (lì) for 'grain/particle' and 升 (shēng) for 'liter' in mainland China.
Example Sentences
Common Compounds
Similar Characters — Don't Mix These Up
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