菜 — Chinese character
菜
cài
vegetables; order, dish; food
- Pinyin
- cài
- Radical
- 140 ⾋ (Grass)
- Strokes
- 12
- Components
- 艹 采
- Formation
- pictophonetic — plant; meaning component 艹; sound component 采
- Japanese
- 菜 as a kanji
Common words with 菜
| Word | Pinyin | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| 蔬菜 | shū cài | vegetables |
| 菜单 (菜單) | cài dān | menu; measure word: 份 (fèn), 张 (zhāng) |
| 菜肴 (菜餚) | cài yáo | vegetable and meat dishes; dish |
| 菠菜 | bō cài | spinach (CL:棵 (kē)); (slang) gambling; gambler (alternative term for 博彩 (bó cǎi)) |
| 白菜 | bái cài | Chinese cabbage, esp. napa cabbage (Brassica rapa subsp. pekinensis); sometimes used to refer to bok choy (Brassica rapa subsp. chinensis) |
| 菜鸟 (菜鳥) | cài niǎo | (coll.) sb new to a particular subject; rookie |
| 饭菜 (飯菜) | fàn cài | food |
| 泡菜 | pào cài | pickled cabbage |
| 紫菜 | zǐ cài | edible seaweed of genus Porphyra or genus Pyropia, esp. one used to make dried sheets of nori |
| 菜刀 | cài dāo | vegetable knife; kitchen knife |
| 榨菜 | zhà cài | hot pickled mustard tuber |
| 甜菜 | tián cài | (sugar) beet; (US) beet; (UK) beetroot |
English words written with 菜
菜 in the Chinese classics
Occurrences: Analects 1 · Mencius 1 · Zhuangzi 1
Data: Make Me a Hanzi (Arphic Public License (graphics.txt); LGPL-3.0-or-later (dictionary.txt)); Unihan Database (Unicode License v3); CC-CEDICT (CC BY-SA 4.0). Retrieved 2026-10-22.