shaanxi
/ʃɑːnˈʃiː/
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 2.41 in modern English
17
Scrabble Score
7
Letters
2
Syllables
6
Unique Chars
Meaning
Example Sentences
- "The fact, therefore, that the Tae pings, when they raised the siege of Hwae king on the 1st September marched westwards by it into Shan se, shows that the Imperial forces were strong enough to prevent their descent by the Wei river."
- "Under the Pinyin system, two neighboring provinces of northern China are both spelled "Shanxi". In this special case, one of the provinces is now spelled "Shaanxi", to indicate a different tone in the first syllable."
- "Three pieces of paper which may date back to between 73 and 49 BC were recently found in Fufeng county, Shaanxi province."
- "HUANG DI, the legendary Yellow Emperor to whom is attributed the founding of the Chinese nation about 2000 B.C., is said to have been buried on the loess plateau. There is a tomb in Shaanxi province’s Huangling county which has long been honored as his."
- "Relevant new discoveries in China, not yet described, include polybranchiaspids and hanyangaspids which were recently (1981-82) recovered from an Early Silurian formation in western Hunan Province of south China, and in southern Shaanxi Province, west China."
- ""Archeologists drew almost a complete blank in their search of the inner tomb," the official New China News Agency said Saturday in a report of excavations at the tomb site, thought to be between 2,200 and 2,800 years old. The site is in Fengxiang County of Shaanxi Province, about 90 miles west of the ancient Yellow River capital of Xian."
Etymology
From a modified form of the Hanyu Pinyin romanization of Chinese 陝西 /陕西 (Shǎnxī, “West of the Shan [Pass]”). The double-a spelling, used certainly to avoid homography with Shanxi (山西, of shān rather than shǎn), is not a feature of Hanyu Pinyin and cannot be observed outside reference to Shaanxi (see also: Ningshaan, Shaanbei, Shaan-Gan-Ning, Shaanzhong). It is likely inherited from the pre-Pinyin Latinxua Sin Wenz system devised and employed by Communist linguists, which was toneless and employed "irregular spellings" for undesirable homographs. The pairs Shaansi (陝西 /陕西) and Shansi (山西) appear (for the first time?) in the influential Sin Wenz primer 《中國話寫法拉丁化——理論·原則·方案》 (1935). An alternative theory is that the double-a spelling is from the Gwoyeu Romatzyh romanization system, where the third tone is spelled by doubling a vowel (Shaanshi 陝西 /陕西 vs. Shanshi 山西), but this is less likely considering the history of Gwoyeu Romatzyh and Sin Wenz, including the political and ideological rivalry between the two systems.
Word Breakdown
- Root: -
Inflected Forms
Shen-hsi (alternative)
Shenhsi (alternative)
Xensi (alternative)
Xienxi (alternative)
Sciensii (alternative)
Chensi (alternative)
Shanxi (alternative, Hanyu Pinyin)
Shaangxi (alternative)
Sha'anxi (alternative)
Shenxi (alternative)
Phrases
Not to be confused with Shanxi
Frequently Paired Words
Not to be confused with Shanxi