梳

• Pinyin: shū
• Hanzi breakdown: 梳 = 木 + 疏 (wood + loose/sparse — a comb; fine-toothed wooden implement)

Meaning

To comb; to untangle; a comb.

Both a verb (to comb hair) and a noun (a comb). As a verb, used literally for grooming and figuratively for untangling, organising, or clarifying complex information. Key collocations: 梳头 (to comb one's hair); 梳辫子 (to plait braids); 梳理思路 (to organise one's thinking).

Examples

1. 她每天清晨坐在梳妆台前，用那把从外祖母处传下来的象牙梳仔细梳理长发，这个仪式性的动作成为她一天中难得的宁静时刻。 Every morning at dawn, she sat at her vanity and carefully combed her long hair with the ivory comb passed down from her grandmother; that ritual became one of the few peaceful moments in her day.
2. 要真正理解这段复杂的历史，研究者必须耐心地梳理各方史料，辨别史实与建构叙事之间的本质差异。 To truly understand this complex period of history, researchers must patiently sort through sources from all sides and distinguish the essential differences between historical facts and constructed narratives.
3. 会议结束后，项目负责人花了整整一个下午的时间梳理各部门反馈的问题清单，逐条分析成因并制定针对性的解决预案。 After the meeting, the project lead spent an entire afternoon organizing the list of issues raised by each department, analyzing the causes one by one, and drafting targeted contingency plans.

Usage Guide

Context: daily life, grooming, analysis, organisation

Tone: neutral

Do Say

• 她一思路混乱，就拿起纸笔梳理各个论点的关系。(Whenever her thinking gets confused, she picks up pen and paper to sort out the relationships among the arguments.)
• 这位历史学家花了数年梳理各地档案中的原始文献。(This historian spent years sorting through primary documents in archives around the world.)

Don't Say

• 梳 alone to mean 'to organise/sort' in formal written Chinese — use 梳理 instead, which is the standard compound verb for the figurative meaning of organising or untangling; bare 梳 sounds incomplete or overly colloquial in this figurative sense

Origin & History

梳 = 木 (wood) + 疏 (sparse/loose — originally depicted fine-toothed implement; comb)

Cultural Context

Generation: All ages

Social background: Universal