Starting from the collocations of chi “to eat” with those animalassociated food names, the paper discusses the gestalt of chi. The study shows that the gestalt of chi includes not only the chain links of “putting food into mouth”, “chewing” and “swallowing”, but also the links of “source of food”, “cooking”, “digesting”, “absorbing”, etc. The collocations of chi and its transitivity and meaning are all essentially related with its gestalt link(s). A detailed discussion of the gestalt of chi is helpful in the understanding of its collocations, semantics and expressions. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014