谁知道
shéi zhī dào · HSK 7
Who would have imagined...?
🔮 shéi (who) + zhī (know) + dào = who knows... = God knows / who'd have thought
Literally 谁 who + 知道 to know, so who knows. Said with a shrug for an unexpected twist: who would have thought it would turn out this way.
谁 — speech radical 言 + short-tailed bird 隹
A semantic-phonetic compound: 言 (speech) gives the meaning 'to ask/say,' while 隹 (a short-tailed bird) supplied the ancient sound. Originally meaning 'to question,' it was borrowed for the interrogative pronoun 'who,' which became its dominant modern use.
道 — 辶 (walk) + 首 (head)
Originally a compound of 辶 'walk/movement' and 首 'head', depicting a path one walks while looking ahead. The literal sense 'road, way' extended metaphorically to 'method, doctrine, the Way (Dao)'. This philosophical meaning became central in Daoist and Confucian thought.