“Che” is a pictographic word. In oracle bone inscriptions, the character looks like a two-wheeled vehicle. It was until the Chinese character had evolved to the seal script stage that the word was written vertically. So it is safe to say that early in the Shang Dynasty, China had invented two-wheeled vehicles. The original meaning of “che” was “wheel”, but now it refers to any of the transportation tools. As time goes by, “che” has gradually become a radical of the Chinese characters. Almost all the characters related to the vehicle take “che” as the semantic radical, such as lun (轮, wheel), jiao (轿, car; sedan), nian (辇, man-drawn carriage), to name just a few.

In modern Chinese, “che” carries the meaning of “machine”, which can be used to refer to things related to “wheel”, such as “windmill”, “spinning wheel”, and so on.