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折

shé / zhé / zhē
verb #4,804

Meanings

  1. 1 to snap; to break (a stick, a bone, etc.)
  2. 2 (bound form) to lose money; to sustain a business loss

Examples

别爬那么高，腿会折的。
Bié pá nàme gāo, tuǐ huì shé de.
Don't climb that high — you'll snap your leg.
那笔生意他折了好几千。
Nàbǐ shēngyi tā shé le hǎojǐqiān.
He took a loss of several thousand on that deal.
那家店折本半年了，终于关门了。
Nàjiā diàn shéběn bànnián le, zhōngyú guānmén le.
The shop has been losing money for half a year and has finally closed.

Tips

usage
The shé reading appears in two narrow places: (1) a clean physical snap (树枝折了 — the branch snapped), often spontaneous, contrasted with the deliberate 折断; and (2) the business-loss idiom 折本 / 折了 — to sell at a loss. Everything else is zhé.
memory
Memory hook: shé rhymes with English "shay" — the sound of a stick going SHAY-snap. The merchant who loses money goes home empty: his profit got snapped clean off, just like that branch.

Components

radical
扌 shǒu
hand (left-side radical)
Left hand radical — three strokes, the compressed left-side form of 手. Anchors 折 in the verbs-of-the-hand family alongside 打 (hit), 拿 (take), 推 (push), 抓 (grab). Sets the action: a hand doing something to wood — specifically, here, a hand swinging an axe.
semantic
斤 jīn
axe; catty
Right axe component — pictograph of a hafted axe-head (the same 斤 used as a weight unit, 'catty', because axes were once standard weights). Compound ideograph: hand (扌) + axe (斤) = breaking wood with a blade, hence 'to break, snap, fold'. From the snap-an-arrow image came 'discount' (a deduction = a snapped-off piece) and 'setback' (something broken).

Stroke Order

折 shé