Hello everyone! Welcome to October, the spookiest month of all. For this issue’s hanmoji puzzle, we dig up some fabulous melon-themed trivia for the incoming fall.
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
We’re taking a break from our usual format this week to serve up some delectable trivia. Here’s how it’s going to work: We’re going to give you the story behind the Chinese word for a type of melon/gourd/squash, and then we want you to pick which emoji combination best represents it.
Here’s the story:
This melon/gourd/squash is imported from the Americas to China. It was planted in a part of China that had more favorable growing conditions for it to thrive (and taste better!). The Chinese name for this melon/gourd/squash then takes after the direction from which it came to other parts of China.
Of the four hanmoji below, which one do you think matches the story best?
🧭➡️ 🍈
🧭⬇️ 🍈
🧭⬅️ 🍈
🧭⬆️ 🍈
Hint: We are using the compass and direction emoji here to represent the Chinese characters for east, south, west and north.
⏳
⏳
⏳
Bonus question: What do you think the melon/gourd/squash in question is?
⏳
⏳
⏳
🫢 Answer (spoilers ahead!)
🧭⬇️ 🍈 stands for 南瓜 (nánguā/naam4 gwaa1), which means pumpkin or cushaw squash. This “southern melon” is actually the umbrella term for several varieties of squash, as Wikipedia points out, but most importantly (for the purposes of this spooky month!), it is the Chinese word for pumpkin.
🥳 Updates from our parent project, The Hanmoji Handbook
We’ve been nominated for a Forest of Reading Yellow Cedar Award.
We’re running multiple workshops at FOLD Kids this November!
Our book is now out — order it now on IndieBound 🇺🇸, Shop Local 🇨🇦, Blackwell’s 🌏, Barnes & Noble 🇺🇸, or Indigo 🇨🇦.
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.