It’s here! The Hanmoji Handbook has arrived in stores across North America and the UK this week 👶🏻➡️🇺🇸🇨🇦🇬🇧!
And this is Hanmoji Puzzles, your weekly dose of emoji word puzzles inspired by The Hanmoji Handbook. And don’t worry — you don’t need to speak Chinese at all in order to play along. You just need a love for emoji and be curious about how language works!
🧩 This week’s puzzle
To celebrate our book’s release, we’re going to build a puzzle around one of the hanmoji combos in our book. Here goes 🥁🥁🥁…
What do you think this emoji combination means in Chinese?
🪙🔥
Hint 1️⃣: The two hanmoji are building block “radicals” (a concept we introduced in last week’s newsletter) that combine to form a single Chinese character.
Hint 2️⃣: Both emoji represent Chinese characters that we feature in our Five Elements chapter. Here’s an excerpt from p36 introducing them:
⏳
⏳
⏳
🫢 Answer (spoilers ahead!)
🪙🔥 stands for 鈥 in Traditional Chinese and 钬 in simplified Chinese. It means holmium (a rare metal), and is pronounced huǒ in Mandarin, and fo2 in Cantonese.
This character refers to holmium, a rare-earth mineral that was discovered in 1878. Do you recognize its two parts?
The first part, 🪙 金 (jīn/gam1), “metal,” is semantic: it carries some of the character’s meaning (in the simplified Chinese radical, 🪙 金 is written as 钅, which saves three strokes). The second part, 🔥 火 (huŏ/fo2), “fire,” is phonetic, since the Mandarin pronunciation, huŏ, sounds like the beginning of holmium. (The name holmium comes from Holmia, the Latin name for Stockholm, which is the hometown of one of the scientists who discovered the element.) The second part (“fire”) is also semantic, because holmium burns easily.
(Quote from page 52.)
🥳 Updates from our parent project, The Hanmoji Handbook
Our book has been featured on Emojipedia — our favorite online resource for all things emoji! Read editor in chief Keith Broni’s interview with us here.
Our Toronto bookstore launch party is happening at Another Story Bookshop on the evening of September 16. More details here.
Our book is out! Order it from IndieBound 🇺🇸, Shop Local 🇨🇦, Blackwell’s 🌏, Barnes & Noble 🇺🇸, or Indigo 🇨🇦.
And thank you to all of you who came out to our online launch party on Gather last night!
Hanmoji Puzzles is a spin off of The Hanmoji Handbook: A Guide to Learning Chinese Through Emoji, which you should absolutely order today 😗. This newsletter is a project by Jason Li, An Xiao Mina and Jennifer 8. Lee.