noun HSK 4 #793

Meanings

  1. 1 bottom; base; underside
  2. 2 background (of a picture, fabric, design)
  3. 3 foundation; underlying basis
  4. 4 draft; copy kept as record
  5. 5 end (of a year or month)
  6. 6 radix; base (mathematics)

Examples

HSK 1
到底怎么回事
Dàodǐ zěnme huíshì?
What on earth is going on?
HSK 2
Gōngsī niándǐ hěn máng.
The company is busy at year-end.
HSK 3
Hǎidǐ shìjiè hěn měi.
The seabed world is beautiful.

Tips

usage
anchors a wide family of 'bottom / base' compounds across literal and figurative space: physical (海底 seabed, 脚底 sole, 鞋底 shoe sole), temporal (年底 year-end, 月底 month-end), figurative (底线 bottom line, 底气 inner confidence, 底蕴 cultural depth), and intensifier (到底 on earth / after all, 彻底 thoroughly).
register
has a second reading de (toneless), an archaic equivalent of the modern possessive particle . You will only see it in pre-modern texts - Republican-era essays, classical-flavored writing, or older translations. In all contemporary Chinese, write instead. No modern compound uses this reading.
memory
Picture a building's foundation: 广 is the shelter roof above, (low / base) sits underneath - the lowest part inside the shelter. The phonetic also means 'low,' so sound and meaning point the same way.

Components

radical
广 yǎn
shelter; lean-to
Outer indexing shelter radical 广 (Kangxi #53) - a roof with one wall, a lean-to or open-sided building. Frames as something inside an enclosed space. Same radical anchors (shop), (courtyard), (bed), (warehouse) - all bounded interior spaces, where the bottom of the room is the natural reference of .
phonetic
low; foundation
Inner component supplies the sound: → dǐ (just a tone shift). itself meant 'low / base' (a hand pressing down to a fixed point), so it doubles as a tight semantic match - 'the low part inside a building' = the bottom. Same phonetic in (low), (resist), (residence).

Stroke Order