片段

• Pinyin: piàn duàn
• Hanzi breakdown: 片 = half of 木 split (a thin slice — flat fragment); 段 = 殳 + 㫃 (weapon + strike — to divide into sections)

Meaning

A fragment; excerpt; segment; a brief passage from a text, conversation, memory, or performance extracted from a larger whole.

片段 implies incompleteness — a piece taken from a larger whole. Used for textual excerpts, memory fragments, video clips, or musical passages. Key collocations: 零碎的片段, 记忆片段, 精彩片段, 关键片段. Distinguished from 段落 which implies a complete structural unit.

Examples

1. 纪录片导演从三百小时的原始素材中精心剪辑，最终保留了最能打动人心的几个关键片段。 The documentary director carefully edited three hundred hours of raw footage and ultimately kept only a few key segments that were most moving.
2. 他对那段童年经历的记忆支离破碎，脑海中只剩下几个孤立的片段，无法还原出完整的事件经过。 His memories of that childhood experience are fragmented; only a few isolated bits remain in his mind, and he can’t reconstruct the full sequence of events.
3. 研究者通过分析政治人物公开演讲中的典型片段，归纳出了其修辞策略中反复出现的几种核心模式。 By analyzing typical excerpts from politicians’ public speeches, researchers summarized several core rhetorical patterns that recur in their strategies.

Usage Guide

Context: film, literature, memory, music, media

Tone: neutral

Do Say

• 课堂教学中适当引入文学经典的精彩片段，既能激发学生对整部作品的阅读兴趣，又能有效示范高质量语言表达的具体形式。(Appropriately incorporating excellent passages from literary classics in classroom teaching can both stimulate students' interest in reading the complete work and effectively model specific forms of high-quality language expression.)
• 这段对话只是完整录音的一个片段，断章取义地引用可能严重扭曲说话者的本来意图，甚至对当事人造成不公正的伤害。(This dialogue is only a fragment of the complete recording; quoting it out of context may seriously distort the speaker's original intent and even cause unjust harm to the person involved.)

Don't Say

• 这只是一个片段想法 — 片段 modifies concrete excerpts, not abstract thoughts; say 这只是一个零散的想法 or 思路还不完整

Origin & History

片 (flat piece, fragment — half of 木 split vertically) + 段 (section, segment — cut into portions) — a flat fragment or segment cut from a whole

Cultural Context

Generation: All ages

Social background: Universal