Etymology

gua sha

gua·sha

Today it means: A treatment used in traditional Chinese medicine involving repeated pressured strokes over the skin with a hard object thereby breaking surface capillaries and leaving light bruising, claimed to release unhealthy bodily matter. Full definition →

Mandarin 刮痧
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The story

  1. Mandarin · borrowed from刮痧
  2. English todaygua sha

Borrowed from Mandarin 刮痧 (guāshā, literally “scrape [away] illness”).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.