Kilo Lingo

(gōng) - merit, achievement, work (bound morpheme) in Mandarin

gōng

Traditional: 功

Line drawing of 功
Coloured illustration of 功
#5209 of 5,000 Core 5000

Translation

merit, achievement, work (bound morpheme)

Word origin

A phono-semantic compound of 工 (gong, work) supplying the sound and 力 (li, strength) on the right giving the sense of effort, together meaning merit or achievement.

Origin
phono-semantic compound
Root
工 (gong, phonetic) + 力 (li, strength)

Stroke order

Stroke order for 功

Examples

He finally succeeded.

ǒu

Success is not an accident.

I hope you succeed in the exam.

zhā

His skills have been trained solidly.

Success takes hard work.

功 (gōng) means achievement or merit. It is a bound morpheme that anchors success-related words, most famously 成功 (chéng gōng), success.

Appears in 1 word

Multi-character compounds in the corpus that contain 功.

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This word is part of lesson 105.