餐桌
cān zhuō · HSK 7
dining table
🍽️ cān = meal + zhuō = table — the meal-table
餐 (cān) means meal or food, and 桌 (zhuō) means table. Together they literally say meal-table, the specific table where you sit down to eat dinner.
餐 — 歺 (bone fragment) + 又 (hand) + 食 (food)
Originally a phono-semantic compound showing a hand (又) taking food from bones (歺), with 食 (food) as the meaning component. The top portion 'cǎn' provides the sound, while 食 indicates the meaning of eating. Over time it came to mean 'meal' or 'to eat.'