bāo
noun #30,576

Meanings

  1. 1 spore (reproductive cell of fungi, ferns, mosses)

Characters

Examples

HSK 7-9
Mógu kào bāozǐ fánzhí.
Mushrooms reproduce by spores.
HSK 7-9
Jué lèi zhíwù shǔyú bāozǐ zhíwù.
Ferns belong to the spore-bearing plants.

Tips

usage
essentially never appears alone - it's a 19th/20th-century coined character used to translate the European biological term 'spore.' You'll see it in 孢子 ('spore'), 孢子植物 ('spore-bearing plants'), 孢蒴 ('sporangium / spore capsule').
memory
= ('child/seed') + ('wrap / packet') giving both meaning and sound: a 'wrapped seed' is a perfect description of a spore. Same phonetic pattern as ('flower bud') - 'wrapped petals' - but with a different radical to mark the biological cell.

Components

radical
child; seed
Left child radical - pictograph of a swaddled infant with arms but no legs visible. Carries the 'offspring, seed' meaning here: a spore is a single reproductive cell, the smallest unit of fungal or fern offspring. Same family: child, grandchild, pregnant, to hatch.
phonetic
bāo
wrap; package; bundle
Right supplies the sound bāo with no drift, identical pinyin. itself depicts a foetus wrapped in the womb - and that meaning carries through here as a faint semantic bonus: a spore is a tiny package of life, wrapped in a tough outer wall ready to be released. Same phonetic in hug, bubble, run.

Stroke Order

bāo