僵局
jiāng jú · HSK 7
impasse
🔒 僵 stiff/frozen + 局 situation = a frozen situation that cannot move = deadlock
僵 means stiff or rigid (as in 僵硬), and 局 means a situation or game-state. A situation gone rigid is one where no side can move — an impasse. Note jú here is the same 局 as in 局面 (situation).
僵 — 亻 person + 畺 boundary/phonetic
僵 is a phono-semantic compound: the 亻 (person) radical hints at meaning, while 畺 supplies the sound. It originally described a person fallen rigid, then extended to 'stiff,' 'frozen,' or 'deadlocked,' and gave us 僵尸 (jiāngshī), the stiff reanimated corpse.
局 — 尸 (body/shelter) + 句 (phrase, phonetic)
局 originally depicted a confined space marked off by a boundary, with 尸 suggesting an enclosed shelter and 句 hinting at the sound. From 'enclosed area' it extended to mean a chessboard square, then a defined situation, office, or bureau. Modern senses like 'department' and 'situation' grew from this idea of a bounded scope.