Why the heck is 血 a 多音字?

pr. [xie3] / also pr. [xue3]

出血
chūxuè

bleeding / hemorrhage / fig. spending money

狗血
gǒuxiě

melodramatic / contrived

oh it gets much worse than that. There are also multiple tone variants.

From my recent post on Chinese Pod for the Market Research 3: Assessing the Competition discussion:

My Mandarin popup gives the following:

献血 xiànxuè "to donate blood"

血液 xuèye "blood"

输血 shūxuè "to transfuse blood"

For the word 血by itself the dictionary gives lots of choices: xuè is the first one, but "informal colloquial and Taiwan pronunciation xiě, also pronounced xuě." are offered as alternatives.

Yeah, I can NEVER remember the pronunciation for this word. I remember the ChinesePod hosts once saying that this is one of those words where the pronunciation given in all the standard dictionaries is not how most people actually pronounce it, but of course I have forgotten what most people do actually say. I think it's probably either xie3 or xue3 that podster mentioned above.

Personally, I've always said it (and my parents have said it) as xue3 - bearing in mind they are from Taiwan / Malaysia so it might be different in Mainland china.

血的发音有两个，xuè和xiě。xiě是比较口语的，所以经常用在比较口语的词。比如说Nicki所列举的“狗血”，还有鸡血、血糊糊的、哎呀你流血啦等等，不过在任何情况下读成xuè也可以。

If it's more kouyu use xie3, if it's more formal use xue1, but they're more or less interchangable, so don't be bothered about mixing them about!

@Byzanti: you mean for formal use xuè, right? Don't tell me there's a xue1 too!

This is what something called 文白异读. A description can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literary_and_colloquial_readings_of_Chinese_characters .

Posted this to google + as well, and have several responses there including some from native Chinese speakers if you are interested:

https://plus.google.com/u/0/116939697102412430399/posts/dAmbi7xoUC6

@Byzanti: you mean for formal use xuè, right? Don't tell me there's a xue1 too!

Woops! Sorry, you're right, I meant fourth tone!

我在上面早就说过了，可被忽略了。呜呜 :(