In Mandarin Chinese, 蛛 (Pinyin: zhū 🔊) means “spider”. According to Wiktionary, 蛛 is a phono-semantic compound of semantic 虫 (“insect”) and phonetic 朱 (zhū), while Lawrence J. Howell writes in his Etymological Dictionary of Han/Chinese Characters that “the conceptual influence lent here by 朱 is uncertain”.
There are not too many compounds of 蛛. One of them is 蜘蛛 (zhīzhū 🔊) which is another word for spider. In Chinese, the 蜘 part is not used on its own; in Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese 蜘 also means “spider”. So does the reduplicated form, 蛛蛛 (zhūzhu). A compound of 蛛 with 网 “net”, 蛛网 (zhūwǎng), means “spider web”.
In Japanese, 蜘蛛 is pronounced kumo (🔊).
蜘蛛何と
芭蕉
Kumo nan to oto wo nan to naku aki no kaze With what voice,
Bashō
(Translated by R.H. Blyth) |
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