坪 (píng): a plain / flat land

Measure Word

一块坪 kuài

Meanings

1 a plain / flat land
2 ping (unit of area, approx. 3.3 sq meters, used in Japan and Taiwan)

Characters

坪

píng

flat land / plain / ping (area unit)

Examples

HSK 6

草坪上铺满了绿色的草皮。

Cǎopíng shàng pūmǎn le lǜsè de cǎopí.

The lawn was covered with green turf.

HSK 7-9

这间公寓大约有三十坪。

Zhè jiān gōngyù dàyuē yǒu sānshí píng.

This apartment is about thirty ping in size.

Tips

culture

In Taiwan and Japan, 坪 (ping) is a common unit for measuring floor area in real estate. One ping equals approximately 3.3058 square meters or about 35.6 square feet.

Components

radical

土 tǔ

earth; soil

Left earth radical, a mound of soil on the ground line, the indexing radical. Anchors 坪 in the family of terrain words: 地 land, 场 field, 坡 slope, 坎 pit. Marks the meaning of flat open ground as a feature of the earth.

phonetic

平 píng

flat; level

Right 平 supplies both sound and meaning, píng exactly, and the core sense of flatness. Earth (土) + flat (平) yields 'flat ground,' a tidy semantic doubling. Same phonetic family: 评 to comment, 苹 apple, 萍 duckweed. A model phono-semantic compound where the phonetic happens to be perfectly semantic too.