12 Light the Spooky Fire 🔥
For our final issue in October, help us carve out our spookiest emoji yet
Hallow everyone! Halloween is upon us, and we wanted to leave you with one final hanmoji before you hit the streets for sweets, carve up some jack-o'lanterns, and possibly consume way too much candy.
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
This one’s a doozy, but we’re going to help you out, so don’t worry:
⬇️ 🧭🍈🔥📍
This string of emoji represents three Chinese characters:
⬇️ 🧭
🍈
🔥📍
In case you missed Issue 10 on the cardinal melons, here’s a recap of the first two characters.
First we’ll start start with:
⬇️ 🧭
What does the downward-facing point of a compass represent?
Now we’ll go to:
🍈
We’ll make this one easy for you: it just means a melon/gourd/squash, or 瓜 (guā/gwaa1), in Chinese. Can you see the roots and leaves sprouting from the melon in the 瓜 character?
Now let’s go to the final emoji pairing:
🔥📍
We’ve spoken about 🔥(火) in Issue 5. Its role as one of the five Chinese elements, and how it combines with 🪙 (金) to create a fiery, rare earth metal 🔥🪙 (鈥/钬)called holmium.
We admit this last character is kind of a hard one, and it really only works for the simplified Chinese version of this character.
And now once again, all together now — what do you think this sequence of emoji represents in Chinese?
⬇️ 🧭🍈🔥📍
Hint: This is a pumpkiny, fiery object popular both outside and inside homes during Halloween.
⏳
⏳
⏳
🫢 Answer (spoilers ahead!)
It’s jack o’ lantern!
⬇️ 🧭🍈 stands for 南瓜 (nánguā/naam4 gwaa1), which means pumpkin, or, more literally, southern melon. This reflects the fact that pumpkins come from the south. (We’ll talk more about other melons, like the western melon, or watermelon, in a future issue!)
We use ⬇️ 🧭 to represent 南 (nán/naam4), or south, as it’s a nice combination of a direction emoji with the compass emoji. There’s currently no more direct way to represent cardinal directions with emoji, but maybe there should be.
🔥📍 stands for 燈 (dēng/dang1) in traditional Chinese and 灯 in simplified Chinese, which means lamp, light or lantern. The simplified Chinese character is made of the characters:
🔥 火 (huǒ/fo2): fire.
📍 丁 (dīng/ding1): fourth, boy/man, a surname or a small amount.
As you can see, the character 丁 (dīng/ding1) doesn’t really affect the meaning of the word, but guess what? A lamp, light or lantern in Chinese is pronounced very, very similarly:
🔥📍 燈/灯 is pronounced dēng (Mandarin) or dang1 (Cantonese)
So the 🔥 helps us semantically, as a hint to its meaning, while the 📍 helps us phonetically, as a hint to how it should be pronounced.
Put it all together and you can get ⬇️ 🧭🍈🔥📍 南瓜燈/南瓜灯, or a jack o’ lantern!
🥳 Updates from our parent project, The Hanmoji Handbook
We’ve been nominated for a Forest of Reading Yellow Cedar Award. Tell your Canadian grade schoolers (and teachers and librarians) to take a look at the books and vote for their favorites!
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.