8 Chinese New Year Food Symbols

Eight foods eaten at Chinese New Year, each with the character it is written with, the word that character sounds like, and the wish that pun creates, plus the written characters for food and eating in Chinese and Japanese.

Why eight

Eight is itself the lucky number, because the word for eight sounds like the word for prosperity. That is the mechanism behind every food here: the dish is auspicious because its name sounds like a wish, or its shape resembles something valuable.

Food	Written as	Sounds like	The wish
Whole fish	鱼 yú	余 yú, surplus	Surplus every year. Served whole with head and tail intact, and often not finished, so something is left over.
Dumplings	饼子 jiǎozi	交子 jiāozǐ, the turn of midnight	Wealth, from the ingot shape, and a clean crossing into the new year. Strongest in the north.
Spring rolls	春卷 chūnjuǎn	—	Fried gold. The name means spring roll, and the color and bar shape do the symbolic work.
Nian gao	年糕 niángāo	高 gāo, tall or high	A higher year than the last. A glutinous rice cake, steamed or pan-fried.
Tangyuan	汤圆 tāngyuán	团圆 tuányuán, reunion	The family whole and together. Round in shape and round in name.
Longevity noodles	长堗面 chángshòu miàn	—	A long life, carried by one unbroken strand. Not cut in the kitchen and not bitten through at the table.
Lucky fruit	梗 and 柏	吉 luck, and 金 gold, in Cantonese	Luck and wealth. Tangerines and oranges given in pairs; pomelo puns on the word for having.
Tray of togetherness	全盒	—	Sweetness in every corner. A round or eight-sided tray of candied fruit and seeds, offered to guests.

The puns do not all work in the same language

Fish and surplus are homophones in Mandarin. Tangerine and luck are homophones in Cantonese, and that pairing does not carry the same way in Mandarin. Regional habit splits the table too: dumplings dominate northern New Year meals, while nian gao and tangyuan are far more central in the south.

The written characters people look up separately

Some searches that land here want characters rather than customs. The core one is 食, which covers both food and eating and sits inside most food words; then 吃, to eat; 饭, cooked rice and by extension a meal; and 菜, a dish or vegetable. Japanese uses 食 too, in 食べ物 tabemono and 和食 washoku, plus 弧当 bentō for a packed meal. Simplified and traditional forms are different characters, not styles: 鱼 and 魚 are both fish, and pasting the wrong one is a real error rather than a typo.

Caveats before you paste any of them

These are Han ideographs, not emoji. They render monochrome in the system CJK font and take the color of surrounding text.
On a device with no CJK font they show as empty boxes: a font problem at the reader’s end, not a copy error at yours.
Chinese and Japanese share many of these codepoints, and shapes differ between the two typographic traditions, so untagged text can be drawn in the wrong one.
A screen reader set to an English voice will either skip a Han character or mispronounce it.
Italian food marks, which share this query, are a different thing: protected-origin and quality schemes, covered on food brand symbols.

For characters that really are copyable and really are about food, chopsticks and bento among them, see food symbols to copy and paste.