How to say it in Chinese

Staple food in Chinese

staple food · HSK 5

主食 zhǔ shí

  1. 主 zhǔ master
  2. 食 shí to eat

北方人常把面条当主食。 Northerners often eat noodles as their staple food.

Hear 主食 and see more sentences

More words with 主 or 食

How do you say staple food in Chinese?

Staple food in Chinese is 主食 (zhǔ shí).

Which word should I use?

Start with the first one: it is the easiest on the HSK list. The others say it too, often in a more formal way or for a narrower sense; each one’s page has real sentences that show how it is used.

Where do these words come from?

Our own dictionary’s meanings for the official HSK word list. A word is shown for an English word when that is one of its first meanings; the easiest word whose first meaning it is comes first.

More free tools

Greetings: hello, good morning and goodbye. Measure words: the classifier for any noun. Tone practice: say a word and see your tones. Read any Mandarin: point at a word for its meaning.

Meanings from our own dictionary. Chinese often has more than one way to say a word.