Welcome to Hanmoji Puzzles is your weekly dose of emoji word puzzles. Our puzzles live at the intersection of emoji and the Chinese language, but rest assured they are solvable by Chinese and non-Chinese speakers alike.
You are getting this email because you signed up for a newsletter related to our book, The Hanmoji Handbook. We hope you’ll enjoy this format, where we pair book project updates with a bit of fun and games 🤹🏻♀️.
🥁 Answers to last week’s puzzles
As you may recall, last week we asked:
What do you think these emoji combinations represent in Chinese?
3️⃣ 🛞 🚗
🔥 🚗
⚡️ 🚗
🐎 🚗
🤜🏼 🚗
We already gave out the answer for the first one:
3️⃣ 🛞 🚗 is the hanmoji for 三輪車 (Traditional Chinese) or 三轮车 (Simplified Chinese). It’s pronounced sānlúnchē (Mandarin) or saam1 leon4 ce1 (Cantonese). 3️⃣ 三 means three, 🛞 輪/轮 means wheel, and 🚗 車 means car. So what do you call a three-wheeled car? A tricycle.
But what about the other four?
🔥
Number two is 🔥 🚗, which is the hanmoji for 火車 (Traditional Chinese) or 火车 (Simplified Chinese). Pronounced huǒchē (Mandarin) or fo2 ce1 (Cantonese), this is the combination of the characters for “fire” and “car.” You could say, what kind of car runs on fire? And while it’s true that the combustion engine used in cars (the ones that run on gas anyway) creates a certain kind of fire, there’s a more, um, fiery car in our shared history… the steam locomotive choo-choo train.
⚡️
Number three, ⚡️🚗, is 電車/电车 (diànchē/din6 ce1). This one transliterates to “electricity” and “car.” This might seem like an obvious one — an electric car of course! — but this word has existed long before electric cars were invented. Think about it, which other cars also used electricity in the past? Would it help if we said it’s looks more like a train than a car?
That’s right — it’s the tram or streetcar, which are typically powered by the dangling electrical cables on top of them.
Sidenote: Aaaaactually, ⚡️🚗 電車/电车, is usually used for tram or streetcar, but it is also sometimes used to refer to trolleybuses (aka buses that are also powered by a dangling electric wire on top of it). And to make things even more complicated (or delightful if you are a fellow language nerd), 電車 is also the Japanese kanji for train (pronounced densha).
🐎
Number four, 🐎🚗, is 馬車/马车 (mǎchē/maa5 ce1). Transliterated as “horse” “car,” this one is relatively straightforward. What’s a car, a thing with wheels, that is powered by a horse? A horse-drawn carriage.
🤜🏼
Lastly, 🤜🏼 🚗 confused many of our readers, and we admit we probably should’ve given out more hints for this one. So let’s do that now, and hopefully the answer will come to you as your eyes glide across the screen. First, we are using 🤜🏼 to mean “to hit,” which is 打 (dǎ/daa2) in Chinese. We should probably also mention that this works in Mandarin, but not really in Cantonese (it sounds close, it’s not the same Chinese character in Cantonese). Does that help? Can you guess what 🤜🏼 🚗 打車/打车 means?
While there is no special term for punching a car, take a step back and think about why you might want to reach your arm (and hand) out to a car… maybe to flag down a car or taxi on the road?
That’s right 🤜🏼 🚗 打車/打车 stands for taking a or going by car or taxi. The twist is that in Cantonese we usually say 搭車/搭车 (dāchē/daap3 ce1) to mean the same thing, and you have to admit that 打車/打车 (dǎchē/daa2 ce1) and 搭車/搭车 (dāchē/daap3 ce1) sound very very similar.
Okay so that was a mouthful. We hope you still have room for…
🧩 This week’s puzzle!
What do you think these emoji combinations represent in Chinese?
🛣👄
➡️ 👄
⬅️ 👄
🌊 👄
Here we are using 👄 as the hanmoji for 口 (kǒu/hau2), which usually means mouth.
Hint: These are all, in some way, related to wayfinding or things you ordinarily find on a map.
⏳
Email us with your answers and we’ll let you know if you got it right. We’ll also unveil the answers in next week’s newsletter too, if you’re willing to wait.
🥳 Updates from our parent project, The Hanmoji Handbook
We’re lining up a venue for a physical, IRL launch event in September. Stay tuned for details.
Our book comes out August 30! Pre-order it today on IndieBound 🇺🇸🇨🇦, Wordery 🌏, Barnes & Noble 🇺🇸, Indigo 🇨🇦, or Amazon 🇺🇸.
Hanmoji Puzzles is a spin off of The Hanmoji Handbook: A Guide to Learning Chinese Through Emoji, which you should absolutely pre-order today 😗. This newsletter is a project by Jason Li, An Xiao Mina and Jennifer 8. Lee.