Word.ws English Dictionary

jinshi

Syllables: Jin·shi/d͡ʒɪnˈʃi/

jinshi noun: “advanced” or “entered graduate”, a scholar who had successfully passed the highest level of the Chinese imperial examinations (殿試), usually held triennially at the imperial court.

Noun

jinshi

  1. “advanced” or “entered graduate”, a scholar who had successfully passed the highest level of the Chinese imperial examinations (殿試), usually held triennially at the imperial court.
    • Fan was a native of En-shih, Hupeh. Handsome and intelligent, he went to Peking and made a name for himself quickly after passing the chin-shih examination in 1877.[1965 December, Ramon L. Y. Woon, Irving Y. Lo, “Poets and Poetry of China's Last Empire”, in Literature East and West, volume IX, number 4, New Paltz, N. Y.: State University College, →OCLC, page 334
    • Again there is the story of the experience that befell Huang Yüeh, who obtained his chin-shih during the Ch’ien-lung era (1736-96) and rose to become director of the Board of Rites (li-pu shang-shu), equivalent to a minister of education. He went into the compound to take the examination and was...[1976, Ichisada Miyazaki, “The Provincial Examination and Reexamination”, in Conrad Schirokauer, transl., China's Examination Hell: The Civil Service Examinations of Imperial China, Weatherhill...

Proper noun capitalized: Jinshi

Jinshi

  1. A county-level city of Changde, Hunan, China.
    • The centuries-old coins were first unearthed on a farm in the southern Hunan province in the 1960s, where they had been kept inside a small glazed pot. They arrived at Jinshi City's museum in the 1980s, and archaeologists have been puzzling over their markings ever since, the Xinhua news agency...2016 February 17, “China museum offers reward to decode historic coins”, in BBC News, archived from the original on 19 Mar 2016, News from Elsewhere

Forms of jinshi

alternative formChin-shih

Origin of jinshi

From the Hanyu Pinyin romanization of the Mandarin 進士 /进士 (jìnshì).

From the Hanyu Pinyin romanization of the Mandarin 津市 (Jīnshì).

Questions about jinshi

What does jinshi mean?
Jinshi means “advanced” or “entered graduate”, a scholar who had successfully passed the highest level of the Chinese imperial examinations (殿試), usually held triennially at the imperial court.
What part of speech is jinshi?
Jinshi can be a noun or a proper noun.
How do you pronounce jinshi?
Jinshi is pronounced /d͡ʒɪnˈʃi/.

Words near jinshi in the dictionary

  1. Jinsha Jiang
  2. Jinshajiang
  3. jinshajiangite
  4. Jinshan
  5. Jinshang
  6. jinshi
  7. Jinshui
  8. jint
  9. Jinta
  10. Jintai
  11. Jintan

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: jinshi (page history and authors); Jinshi (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “jinshi.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/jinshi. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.