Fire Vocabulary
Image via Wikimedia Commons
My daughter learned her first Chinese character at around the age of two, when she was obsessed with fire safety. That character was 火 (fire). Now, at age two and a half, she’s voluntarily learning lots more characters. The 火 as her starting point reminded me of something: there are a lot of cool words in Chinese that start with the character 火!
So here’s my list of relatively beginner-friendly nouns that start with the character 火, some literal character-by-character renderings for fun, and the English translations of the words.
| Chinese | Pinyin | Literal | English |
| 火车 | huǒchē | fire car | train |
| 火鸡 | huǒjī | fire chicken | turkey |
| 火腿 | huǒtuǐ | fire leg | ham |
| 火山 | huǒshān | fire mountain | volcano |
| 火星 | Huǒxīng | fire star | Mars |
| 火球 | huǒqiú | fire ball | fireball |
| 火花 | huǒhuā | fire flower | spark |
| 火药 | huǒyào | fire medicine | gunpowder |
| 火箭 | huǒjiàn | fire arrow | rocket |
I can remember that learning words like these were an enormous part of the charm of just starting to learn Chinese. “Fire mountain”? “Fire arrow” for “rocket”? Awesome. It’s nice to get away from languages that just keep recycling Greek and Latin roots and dig into a language that mostly just uses itself as its own lexical building blocks.
I agree, I’ve always been fascinated with the way Chinese tries to shoehorn new concepts into more familiar ideas. Vegetable names do this a lot—番茄,胡萝卜，西红柿，etc. Foreign eggplant, indeed!
As for fire words, I’ve always liked 火鹤,huohe, fire crane，meaning “flamingo.”
And 火石, huoshi, fire stone, meaning “flint.”
And who could forget 火好似 huohaosi, meaning “brothel.”