拉 (lā): to pull

Meanings

1 to pull
2 to drag
3 to play (a bowed instrument)
4 to chat
5 to defecate

Characters

拉

lā

to pull; to drag

Examples

请拉门。

Qǐng lā mén.

Please pull the door.

她拉着我的手。

Tā lā zhe wǒ de shǒu.

She held my hand.

爷爷会拉二胡。

Yéye huì lā èrhú.

My grandfather can play the erhu.

别拉我，咱们拉一会儿。

Bié lā wǒ, zánmen lā yīhuìr.

Don't pull me — let's chat for a while.

Tips

usage

拉 is the opposite of 推 (push). Doors in China usually show one or the other to tell you which way to open them.

usage

For bowed strings the verb is 拉 (you literally drag the bow): 拉小提琴 (play violin), 拉二胡. Plucked strings use 弹 instead.

register

拉 also covers two reading-edge cases. As a colloquial verb it means to defecate (拉屎, 拉肚子 = to have diarrhoea) — fine in casual speech, off-limits in formal writing. A rising-tone reading lá means to slit or gash (拉一个口子 = to make a cut) — treated as a separate entry. A rare fourth-tone reading là survives only in the dialect word 拉拉蛄 (mole cricket) and as a variant of 落 in a handful of fixed phrases.

Components

radical

扌 shǒu

hand (radical form of 手)

Left-side hand radical, the side form of 手. Anchors 拉 in the manual-action family — pulling, dragging, tugging are core hand activities. Same radical drives 推 (push), 抓 (grab), 扔 (throw), 打 (hit). Provides essentially all the meaning while 立 just supplies sound.

phonetic

立 lì

to stand

Right side 立 supplies the sound (lì → lā, just a tone shift). 立 itself pictures a person planted firmly on the ground. Faint semantic flavour: pulling something requires bracing yourself — 'standing your ground' to drag. Same phonetic in 粒 (grain) and 位 (position).