This is Hanmoji Puzzles, your bi-weekly dose of emoji word puzzles inspired by The Hanmoji Handbook. 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
What popular Christmas pastime do you think this emoji combination represents in Chinese?
👄☀️☀️
Hint 1: these three emoji together represent a single Chinese character.
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Hint 2: this isn’t unlike last week’s puzzle, but with a sunnier awe effect.
⏳
⏳
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🫢 Answer (spoilers ahead!)
👄☀️☀️ stands for 唱 in Chinese, which usually means to sing or call (but sometimes also means to gossip). 唱 is pronounced chàng in Mandarin and coeng3 in Cantonese.
Let’s break it down its parts to divine its meaning:
The left side of 唱 is a mouth 👄 口 (kǒu/hau2). As a Chinese radical, it’s usually used in Chinese characters related to speaking or for onomatopoeia (when words simply mimic sounds in nature).
The right side of 唱 are two suns ☀️ 日 (rì/jat6). Stacked on top of one another, the two suns form the character 昌, which itself means prosperous and flourishing – after all, isn’t a lot of sun a flourishing phenomenon?
So all together now:
口👄 + 昌☀️☀️ = a flourishing way of speaking… which definitely one way of describing singing. (Cue: Christmas carols and “awe” sound effect.)
As a fun fact, and because the components of a Chinese character often contain clues to both their meaning and their pronunciation, the stacked suns (without the 👄), 昌, is pronounced chāng in Mandarin and coeng1 in Cantonese. This is very similar to 唱 (yes to 👄), which is pronounced chàng and coeng3.
We hope that you get to chàng/coeng3/唱/👄☀️☀️ to your heart’s delight this winter holiday season!
🥳 Updates from our parent project, The Hanmoji Handbook
We 99% verified that our book is the first “traditionally published” children’s book with Cantonese/Jyutping.
Toronto Public Library recommended our book in their kid’s resource about Who invented emojis?
South China Morning Post featured their interview with us on their What you need to know about: Chinese culture section.
The Scripps National Spelling Bee included The Hanmoji Handbook in their 2024 Great Words, Great Works books list.
You can get our paperback and hardcover editions on Bookshop.org 🇺🇸, Shop Local 🇨🇦, and Blackwell’s 🌏.
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.