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zhu

nounnounattested in dialogue

An ancient Chinese unit of weight, notionally equivalent to 100 millet seeds or 1/24 of the liang/tael/Chinese ounce, chiefly used in denominating small coins in ancient and early imperial China.

noun

  1. 1

    historicalAn ancient Chinese unit of weight, notionally equivalent to 100 millet seeds or 1/24 of the liang/tael/Chinese ounce, chiefly used in denominating small coins in ancient and early imperial China.

    Modern research showed the correct number of millet seeds greatly exceeded surviving examples of the zhu in weight, until one tried growing older millet strains for several generations without modern agrochemicals. By the third year, his seeds produced a zhu within about 5% of its known historical value.

Etymology

The atonal Hanyu Pinyin romanization of Mandarin 銖 /铢 (zhū).

noun

  1. 1

    historicalAn ancient Chinese string instrument thought to have had a rectangular zither-like body with silk strings played with a bow.

Etymology

The atonal pinyin romanization of the standard Mandarin pronunciation of Chinese 筑 (zhù or zhú).

Forms

plural
zhus

zhu · An ancient Chinese unit of weight, notionally equivalent to 100 millet seeds or 1/24 of the liang/tael/Chinese ounce, chiefly used in denominating…

Zhu · A surname from Chinese.ziggy · zigzaggyZiggy · A nickname mainly for men, but occasionally also for women.
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).