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Chopsticks are shaped pairs of equal length sticks that have been used as the traditional ancient kitchen and eating utensils in virtually all of East Asia for over six thousand years. Chopsticks were first used by the Chinese and later spread to countries, through cultural influence or through Chinese immigrant communities, such as Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Vietnam, Malaysia, Laos, and Myanmar, as well as in areas of the United States,〔https://today.yougov.com/news/2014/10/08/forget-the-chopsticks/〕 especially California and Hawaii,〔http://www.hawaii-aloha.com/blog/2012/06/07/learning-the-art-of-chopsticks/〕 and cities in Canada and Australia with Chinese communities. Chopsticks are smoothed and frequently tapered, and are commonly made of bamboo, plastic, wood, or stainless steel. They are less commonly made from gold, silver, porcelain, jade, or ivory. Chopsticks are held in the dominant hand, between the thumb and fingers, and used to pick up pieces of food. ==Etymology== The English word "chopstick" may have derived from Chinese Pidgin English, in which "chop chop" meant "quickly".〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Definition of chopstick )〕〔Norman, Jerry (1988) ''Chinese'', Cambridge University Press, p267.〕 According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the earliest published use of the word is in the 1699 book ''Voyages and descriptions'' by William Dampier: "()hey are called by the English seamen Chopsticks".〔Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition 1989〕 The Chinese term for chopsticks is ''kuaizi'' (). The first character (筷) is a semantic-phonetic compound with a phonetic part meaning "quick" (快), and a semantic part meaning "bamboo" (竹). In ancient written Chinese, the character for chopsticks was ''zhu'' (箸; Middle Chinese reconstruction: (unicode:d̪jwo-)). Although it may have been widely used in ancient spoken Chinese, its use was eventually replaced by the pronunciation for the character ''kuai'' (快), meaning "quick". The original character, though still used in writing, is rarely used in modern spoken Chinese. For written semantic differentiation between the "fast" (快) versus "chopsticks", a new character was created for "chopsticks" (筷) by adding the "bamboo" (竹) radical (⺮) to it.〔Norman, Jerry (1988) ''Chinese'', Cambridge University Press, p76.〕 In Japanese, chopsticks are called . They are also known as , a phrase commonly printed on the wrappers of disposable chopsticks. ''Te'' means hand and ''moto'' means the area under or around something. The preceding ''o'' is used for politeness. In Korean, 저 (箸, ''jeo'') is used in the compound ''jeotgarak'' (), which is composed of ''jeo'' "chopsticks" and ''garak'' "stick". ''Jeo'' cannot be used alone, but can be found in other compounds such as ''sujeo'' (), meaning "spoon and chopsticks". In Vietnamese, chopsticks are called "''đũa''", which is written as 𥮊 with 竹 ''trúc'' (bamboo) as the semantic, and 杜 ''đỗ'' as the phonetic part. It is an archaic borrowing of the older Chinese term for chopsticks, 箸. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「chopsticks」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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