埋 (mái): to bury; to cover with earth

Meanings

1 to bury; to cover with earth
2 to hide; to conceal

Characters

埋

mái

to bury; to hide

土 (earth) + 里 (inside) — put inside the earth.

Examples

狗把骨头埋在了院子里。

Gǒu bǎ gǔtou mái zài le yuànzi lǐ.

The dog buried the bone in the yard.

这里埋着很多宝藏。

Zhèlǐ mái zhe hěn duō bǎozàng.

There are many treasures buried here.

别把真相埋起来。

Bié bǎ zhēnxiàng mái qǐlai.

Don't bury the truth.

Tips

usage

Core verb 'to put under earth' — literal in 埋葬 (bury the dead), 活埋 (bury alive), 掩埋 (cover over); figurative in 埋头 (head-down, engrossed), 埋伏 (ambush), 埋没 (let talent go unrecognized).

mistakes

Polyphone alert: read mán (2nd tone) ONLY inside 埋怨 (complain, blame). Every other compound — 埋藏, 埋伏, 埋单 — reads mái. Frequent HSK test point.

Components

radical

土 tǔ

earth; soil

Left earth radical — the indexing radical and literal meaning anchor. To bury is to place something into the soil, so the radical names the medium. Pulls 埋 into the ground-related verb family alongside 坑 (pit), 填 (fill), 挖 (dig), 堆 (pile up).

phonetic

里 lǐ

inside; village

Right component supplies a rough sound (里 → mái, an irregular but historically attested phonetic shift) plus a strong semantic hint of 'inside'. Earth + inside = placed inside the earth, a near-perfect ideographic image of burial. The phonetic-semantic combination is unusually transparent.