Kilo Lingo

(hé) - and; with in Mandarin

hé

Traditional: 和

Line drawing of 和
Coloured illustration of 和
HSK 1
#27 of 5,000 Core 1000

Translation

and; with

Word origin

和 (hé) means 'and, harmony'. It pairs 禾 (hé, 'grain', here the phonetic) with 口 (mouth); the original sense related to vocal harmony, later broadening to 'together with' and the conjunction 'and'.

Origin
phono-semantic compound
Root
禾 (hé, grain, phonetic) + 口 (mouth)

Stroke order

Stroke order for 和

和

Examples

。

He and I are classmates.

苹píng蕉jiāo。

Apples and bananas are both delicious.

笔bǐ。

Please put the book and pen on the table.

。

My friends and I are going to see a film.

。

Cats and dogs are both animals.

和 (hé) is the primary coordinating conjunction linking nouns and noun phrases in Mandarin. A key grammatical restriction is that 和 can only join nouns and pronouns - it cannot coordinate verb phrases or clauses the way "and" does in English. For clauses, Mandarin uses other connectors or simply juxtaposes them.

The character 和 originally depicted grain in a vessel, suggesting harmony and balance - meanings that persist in words like 和平 (hépíng, peace) and 和谐 (héxié, harmony). When used as a preposition meaning "with" (我和你一起去, "I'll go with you"), 和 is interchangeable with 跟 (gēn) in most contexts.

Appears in 1 word

Multi-character compounds in the corpus that contain 和.

和平hé píngpeace, peaceful

Used in

Stories

(12)

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This word is part of lesson 1.