Kung Fu

History
The term kung fu was not popular until the 20th century, thus the word would be seldom found in any ancient texts. The term was first known to have been reported by a Westerner, French Jesuit missionary Jean Joseph Marie Amiot, in the 18th century and was known little in the mainstream English language until approximately the late 1960s, when it became popular because of the Hong Kong films, especially those by Bruce Lee, and later Kung Fu - the television series. Before that it was referred to primarily as "Chinese boxing". Kung Fu, as it is written here, refers to the general term of Chinese martial arts. Shaolin Kung Fu refers to the style that was developed in the Shaolin temples.

Translation and usage
Nowadays, the most common use of the term kung fu is when referring to Chinese martial arts in general. Thus, when someone says they study kung fu, they likely mean they study one of the many styles of Chinese martial arts. (An alternative term might be "Zhongguo wushu" (中國武術, literally China martial art)). The original meaning of kung fu is quite different, and is hard to translate as there is no English equivalent. In short, 功夫 (gōngfu) means "achievement through great effort" or simply virtue. It combines 功 (gōng) meaning achievement or merit, and 夫 (fū) which translates into man. In Mandarin, when two "first tone" words such as gōng and fū are combined, the second word often takes a neutral tone, in this case forming gōngfu.

Originally, to practice kung fu did not just mean to practice Chinese martial arts. Instead, it referred to the process of one's training - the strengthening of the body and the mind, the learning and the perfection of one's skills - rather than to what was being trained. It refers to excellence achieved through long practice in any endeavor. You can say that a person's kung fu is good in cooking, or that someone has kung fu in calligraphy; saying that a person possesses kung fu in an area implies skill in that area, which they have worked hard to develop. Someone with "bad kung fu" simply has not put enough time and effort into training, or seems to lack the motivation to do so. Kung fu is also a name used for the elaborate Fujian tea ceremony (Kung-fu cha).

There is a curious contemporary twist on this meaning in the hacker culture: there the fu has been generalized to a suffix, implying that the thing suffixed involves great skill or effort. For example, one may talk of "script-fu" to refer to complicated scripting. It is unknown whether this was consciously based on the original, broader meaning of the term or whether it was a simple wordplay on the less general Western notion of "kung fu".

In Japanese, the characters for kung fu (功夫) retain an approximation of their Chinese reading, and are pronounced kanfū (カンフー). Chinese martial arts in general are also referred to as chūgoku ken (中国拳) or chūgoku kempō(中国拳法), which translates literally to "China fist" and "China fist law," respectively. (Kempō is a generic term for a punching/striking art of Chinese origins.)

In Korean, kung fu is called gongbu (공부), which simply means "study."


Related terms
While the term Kung Fu is used globally as a generic term for the Chinese martial arts — such as Shaolin Kung Fu — certain Chinese words may be used to denote some specific aspect of a style. These words are often based on the theme of the human hand. A common term is the Mandarin word quan or chuan (拳, Cantonese: kuen, Japanese: ken), meaning fist, which conveys the sense of a style of boxing or striking, as in Shaolin Quan (Young Forest Fist) and Wing Chun Kuen (Eternal Spring Fist). The word "chuan", however, may not always denote boxing; Tai Chi Chuan (Supreme Ultimate Fist), for instance, contains the word "chuan" but does not focus on striking in common practice. The term chang or zhang (掌), meaning palm, is also seen, an example being Bagua Zhang (Eight Trigrams Palm). Another similar word is shou (手), or hand, as in Sanshou (Loose Hand or Free Hand).

Some words refer to an art's origin or tradition. One term is pai (派), denoting a school of thought or system, as in Tien Shan Pai and Ying Jow Pai. This is related to the Japanese term ryuha (流派, Mandarin: liúpài), meaning "mainstream school of thought". Some martial arts of Southern China use the Cantonese word gar (家, Mandarin pinyin: jiā), meaning family, as in Hung Gar and Lau Gar (Hung Family, Lau Family), among others.