米饭
mǐ fàn
In real, traceable use. Part of the curated seed collection; community review is coming.
Traditional: 米飯
Plain cooked rice: the rice itself, never a whole meal. 米 alone is the raw grain you buy, and 饭 alone can mean any meal: 吃饭 is 'to eat, to have a meal', not only rice. In a restaurant you order 米饭 to get rice with your dishes.
Cơm trắng: chỉ riêng cơm, không phải cả bữa ăn. Tiếng Trung tách giống tiếng Việt: 米 là gạo, 饭 là cơm. 饭 đứng một mình còn chỉ bữa ăn nói chung: 吃饭 là “ăn cơm” theo nghĩa ăn uống, đúng như cách nói của người Việt.
NounRegister: neutral
Examples
Editorial example (illustrative, not a corpus attestation) — awaiting a native-speaker check
Sources & notes
Hán-Việt bridge batch 064 (2026-11-14). Headword, Traditional form and pinyin checked against CC-CEDICT (CC BY-SA 4.0) source ↗ · Hán-Việt reading: Unihan kVietnamese source ↗ ; en.wiktionary Vietnamese entries via kaikki.org extract, snapshot 2026-07-31 (CC BY-SA 4.0): Hán-Việt reading 米 = mễ · No Vietnamese entry is linked as its twin; the Hán-Việt reading is given character by character. Definition, literal gloss and example sentence are original; the example has not had a native-speaker check yet.
Common questions
What does “米饭” mean?
Plain cooked rice: the rice itself, never a whole meal. 米 alone is the raw grain you buy, and 饭 alone can mean any meal: 吃饭 is 'to eat, to have a meal', not only rice. In a restaurant you order 米饭 to get rice with your dishes.
Is “米饭” formal or informal?
米饭 is generally neutral.