Chinese
/tʃʌɪˈniːz
/adjective
1Relating to China or its language, culture, or people.Investing a sizeable $10 bn, the government is also sponsoring a worldwide network of schools to promote Chinese culture and language....
- The network will spearhead the teaching of Chinese language and culture worldwide while strengthening economic and business ties.
- The Chinese culture and language are very complex in the eyes of most Westerners.
1.1Belonging to the people forming the dominant ethnic group of China and also widely dispersed elsewhere. Also called Han.The PFP and KMT won most of their seats in these areas, as well as among the Hakka Chinese ethnic group or Taiwan's aboriginal communities....
- Song has solicited support from ethnic Chinese scholars for the open letter to China's president.
- In urban centres, there are small Indian, Arab, and ethnic Chinese communities.
noun (plural same)
1 [mass noun] The language of China.These languages include Chinese, Hindi / Urdu, Japanese, Juang, Korean, Icelandic, Lithuanian, and Russian....
- This was offered in broadband by BBC News interactive in six languages including Urdu, Chinese and Arabic.
- His poems have been translated into all Indian languages and foreign languages, including Chinese, French and German.
2A native or inhabitant of China, or a person of Chinese descent.It was retold by the Chinese and by the national minorities of southern and southwest China....
- The purpose of the airlift was to carry enough supplies into Western China to keep the Chinese in the war.
- Hartley easily beat Wu Minxia of China, preventing the Chinese from a possible sweep of diving gold medals.
2.1British informal A Chinese meal: a takeaway Chinese washed down with Chardonnay...
- Forget Chinese, Indian or pizza - a York chip shop is to deliver traditional fish and chips door-to-door.
- Getting pizza, Chinese or curry delivered twice a week at £20 a time adds up to an impressive £173 a month.
- As we are not in training we aren't able to burn off the Chinese or the Kebab you ate the night before.
2.2British informal A Chinese restaurant: we found a Chinese in Soho...
- More fabulous is Gars - which various Brighton friends had assured me was the best Chinese in town, and having tried it I have to agree.
- I love Japanese food and, when I get time, I try to go out to a West End restaurant but it's nice and easy to be able to go to your local Chinese.
- Now to head to the Chinese for a takeaway, then freshen up and head down to Brookes for some light refreshment.
Chinese, a member of the Sino-Tibetan language family, is the world’s most commonly spoken first language, with an estimated 1.2 billion native speakers worldwide. The script is logographic, using characters which originated as stylized pictographs but now also represent abstract concepts and the sounds of syllables. Though complex, it permits written communication between speakers of the many dialects, most of which are mutually incomprehensible in speech. For transliteration into the Roman alphabet, the Pinyin system is now usually used.
