Measure words for parts of the body

I’ve made a few posts lately about measure words. In the first post, I discussed measure words for people, and in a later post, I discussed measure words for animals. Today, I want to round this out with measure words for different parts of the body.

Again, it’s possible with many of these to just use the standard measure word 个 (Gè) but you’ll sound a lot better if you use the appropriate specific measure words.

个 (Gè) can be used for noses though. 一个鼻子 (Yí ge bí zi) is “a nose”.

I mentioned last time that 条 (Tiáo) is one of my favourite measure words. It’s used for most long skinny things. And it’s also used for parts of the body where that applies.

一条腿 (Yì tiáo tuǐ) is “a leg”.

Another measure word that’s used for thin things (or even pipes), is 根 (Gēn). No surprise that it can be used for fingers and hair.

一根手指 (Yì gēn shǒu zhǐ) is “a finger”. 手 (shǒu) is actually the word for hand.

一根头发 (Yì gēn tóu fa) is “a hair”. It’s similar to English in that 头发 (Tóu fa) on its own means “hair” and can refer to all your hair.

Last time, we saw that 只 (Zhī) could be applied to dogs and birds, but it can also be applied to many parts of the body:

一只胳膊 (Yì zhī gē bo) is “an arm”.

一只脚 (Yì zhī jiǎo) is “a foot”.

一只手 (Yì zhī shǒu) is “a hand”.

张 (Zhāng) is a measure word for flat things. The most common example is a sheet of paper. But it also gets applied to the face, and even the mouth:

一张脸 (Yì zhāng liǎn) is “a face”.

一张嘴 (Yì zhāng zuǐ) is “a mouth”.

The final measure word that I want to mention here is 双 (Shuāng). It’s very close in meaning to the English word “pair”, and is used for things like shoes. But some parts of the body are in pairs too:

一双手 (Yì shuāng shǒu] is “a pair of hands”

一双眼睛 (Yì shuāng yǎn jing) is “a pair of eyes”

and there are more things that have pairs as well.

2021-04-09