I am forwarding on my lexicon for the main Chinese characters, and I only have a few words to give a meaning.
Many dictionaries give the meaning of " lining " for 里, the interior layer of clothes, but in Tatoeba, and other websites with sentences for Chinese hanzi, this use looks very rare : not found any.
Any suggestions to confirm or invalidate my " opinion " ?
-
1When you are in the tailoring business, "里" is an indispensable word.– r13Mar 2 at 1:25
-
I'm so sorry for taylors, but it looks like i will not mention lining in my lexicon...– faureMar 2 at 6:33
1 Answer
里 in simplified is a merge of two traditional characters: 里 itself and 裏.
里 lǐ on its own has the spectrum of meanings around 'neighbourhood', 'village', or denotes a unit of length.
裏 lǐ denotes 'internal', 'inside', 'lining' and similar.
The most frequent words containing the simplified 里 clearly belong to both categories: 这里(這裏) 'here', 那里(那裏) 'over there', 哪里(哪裏) 'where', 里边(裏邊) 'inside' - but also 公里(公里) 'kilometre'. As for 'lining' in particular, 衬里(襯裏) 'lining' as well as simply 里子 and 里儿 do not seem that rare. After all, this is how the notion of lining is expressed. 'Lining' does not seem to be that frequent in English as well, but when it appears it does its job.