There is a famous Zen story “one hand clapping” in which a Zen master asks one of his disciples what is the sound of one hand clapping. As the context is Buddhism and you can’t clap with one hand and produce sound, you might have guessed the answer would be related to the soundlessness of our thoughts when our minds reach enlightenment or something like that. I am here to analyse the question “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” linguistically. Let us take the noun phrase one-hand-clapping. Is the noun phrase two-hand-clapping valid? The modifier two-hand is redundant since clapping is, by definition, the act of two hands. If you use the modifier one-hand with the word clapping, the essential element of the meaning, which is the act of two hands, will be cancelled, and the expression will become nonsense. Now let us analyse the sound of one-hand-clapping. If there were something called one hand clapping, it would be hitting the hand to an imaginary other hand. The hand would move repeatedly to and fro. There would be no sound, but your hand would collide with air and produce minuscule friction, but the friction sound would be too low to be sensed by your ears and couldn't be considered as sound. There is a funny story about this question in which the disciple says he doesn't know the answer and the Zen master slaps him. Why does this slapping joke work? Readers can recognize that the meanings of these two terms slapping and one-hand-clapping have overlapping elements: single hand, hand movement, and hitting sound.