What Mandarin pinyin spelling is given for dim sum?

What Mandarin pinyin spelling is given for dim sum? The Mandarin pinyin spelling is diǎn xīn.

The spelling represents 點心 in traditional Chinese or 点心 in simplified Chinese. The two syllables carry tone marks: diǎn has the third tone, while xīn has the first tone. In Mandarin, the term is pronounced differently from the Cantonese form “dim sam,” which English adopted as “dim sum.”

The Chinese expression literally means “touch the heart,” although its older usage referred more broadly to a small snack or something that lightly satisfies hunger. In Cantonese cuisine, dim sum came to describe the many small foods served with tea in teahouses and restaurants. Mandarin pinyin is therefore a language-transliteration clue, not the name of one particular dumpling.

Common mix-ups include xiǎolóngbāo, which is soup dumpling, chāshāo, which refers to Cantonese barbecue pork, and yǐn chá, meaning “drink tea.” Those terms may appear in a dim sum meal, but none is the Mandarin pinyin spelling of dim sum itself.