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According to Kangxi Dictionary (康熙字典), 吃 is equivalent to 喫, which means `to eat`. Its another meaning was `stuttering`. The ghosts part was not supported. ht

• chewxy 10y ago
  Agreed. The ghosts bit is apocryphal. Not difficult to see where it comes from though. Mouth + Qi = spiritual nonsense.
  • prewett 10y ago
    I had to look a bit to figure out how you got "qi" from a word pronounced "chi". 契, the right part of the character is pronounced qi4, as is the character 氣, which does have spiritual meanings. 契, however, has no such meaning (according to wiktionary), so I assume this is another one of those Chinese superstitious puns. Is a preference for 食 a Taiwanese thing? All the mainland Chinese people I've ever heard say 吃.
    • chewxy 10y ago
      There was a linguistic shift to prefer 吃. I would say it probably happened in the Cultural Revolution. In Cantonese 食 is pronounced "sek", and is regularly used - "sek fan" as in "eat rice". Since HK was quite insulated from the Cultural Revolution, and evidence from older texts that use 食 all the time (喫 was not really used IINM), it would not be amiss to say that the development to prefer 吃 is quite new. Hence in my other post I mentioned that it was political agenda that drove selection of preferred words to use. addendum: I think there is also a nice narrative in the shift to use 吃 - it was more a "commoner" word, and communism was then about replacing the elite sounding words with simpler words that is common to everyone. 乞 is most commonly used with 乞丐 (begger), but the etymology of the word comes from qi (气) according to zhongwen.com
      • prewett 10y ago
        I learned Japanese first, and it bothered me that 食 wasn't "eat" in Chinese. I'm glad to know to know the history!