吃喝玩乐
chī hē wán lè · HSK 7
drink and be merry
🍻🎉 eat + drink + play + joy — four pleasures in four characters
Each character names one indulgence: 吃 eat, 喝 drink, 玩 play, 乐 joy. Together they form a ready-made checklist for a hedonistic lifestyle — the idiom means living purely for fun.
吃 — mouth 口 + beg 乞
A semantic-phonetic compound: 口 (mouth) gives the meaning 'to eat,' while 乞 (qǐ, 'to beg') hints at the sound. The original character for 'eat' was 喫; 吃 first meant 'to stutter' but was later adopted as the standard simplified form for 'to eat.'
喝 — mouth radical 口 + 曷 (phonetic)
喝 is a semantic-phonetic compound. The mouth radical 口 signals an action involving the mouth, while 曷 (originally meaning 'why/how') supplies the sound. Early uses meant to shout or call out loudly; the modern sense 'to drink' developed later and is now the dominant meaning in Mandarin.
乐 — stylized depiction of a wooden instrument with strings
Originally a pictograph of a wooden frame holding strings or bells, representing a musical instrument. The character first meant 'music' (read yuè), and by extension came to mean 'joy, happiness' (read lè), since music brings pleasure. The simplified form 乐 streamlines the older 樂.