卡 (kǎ): card

Measure Word

一张卡 zhāng

Meanings

1 card
2 to stop; to block
3 (of a machine or system) to be slow; to lag
4 truck; lorry
5 calorie

Characters

卡

kǎ

card; to block; lag

Examples

你有银行卡吗？

Nǐ yǒu yínhángkǎ ma?

Do you have a bank card?

今天网好卡，视频一直缓冲。

Jīntiān wǎng hǎo kǎ, shìpín yìzhí huǎnchōng.

The internet is really laggy today; the video keeps buffering.

一辆大卡车停在门口。

Yí liàng dà kǎchē tíng zài ménkǒu.

A big truck is parked at the entrance.

Tips

usage

Most modern senses are loanwords transliterating English: 卡 = card (信用卡 credit card, 银行卡 bank card), 卡车 = truck (from "car"), 卡路里 = calorie, 卡通 = cartoon. Colloquially also "slow / laggy" for software: 电脑卡 = my computer is lagging.

mistakes

卡 has a second reading 卡 for the older, native senses — physically wedged/clipped/stuck and customs-style checkpoints (关卡, 发卡 hairclip). Modern loanword senses (card, truck, lag) all stay 卡.

Components

radical

卜 bǔ

divination; downward stroke

Bottom radical 卜 is also the silhouette of 下 (down) without its top bar. The whole character is a visual pun: 上 above + 下 below sharing the middle stroke = something stuck between up and down — jammed, blocked, lodged. From there the native qiǎ senses ("wedged", "checkpost") flow; the modern kǎ senses (card, truck, calorie, cartoon) are 20th-century loanwords that piggyback on the same character.

semantic

上 shàng

up; above

Top half is 上 (up) minus its bottom stroke, fused with the 卜 below. The cleverness of 卡 is that it visually combines 上 (up) and 下 (down) sharing the central horizontal — something pinched between up and down.