拼 (pīn): to piece together; to join; to…

Meanings

1 to piece together; to join; to spell
2 to pool resources; to share (costs)
3 to go all out; to risk everything

Characters

拼

pīn

to piece together; to spell

Examples

孩子在拼拼图。

Háizi zài pīn pīntú.

The child is doing a puzzle.

我们拼车去机场吧。

Wǒmen pīnchē qù jīchǎng ba.

Let's share a ride to the airport.

拼了！今天一定要完成！

Pīn le! Jīntiān yīdìng yào wánchéng!

Let's go all out! We must finish today!

拼音怎么拼？

Pīnyīn zěnme pīn?

How do you spell it in pinyin?

Tips

usage

拼 is incredibly versatile: 拼音 (pinyin spelling), 拼图 (jigsaw puzzle), 拼车 (carpool/ride-share), 拼单 (group buy), 拼命 (risk one's life / go all out). The core idea is always 'putting pieces together.'

culture

拼多多 (Pīnduōduō) — China's massive group-buying e-commerce platform — gets its name from 拼 (to pool together). Users team up to get lower prices.

Components

radical

扌 shǒu

hand (left-side form of 手)

Left hand radical — the indexing component. 拼 is a hand action: putting pieces together, joining, assembling. From there the meaning extends to pooling resources (拼车 carpool), spelling (拼音), and going all out (拼命). Same radical: 推 (push), 拉 (pull), 拿 (take), 抓 (grab).

phonetic

并 bìng

to combine; together

Right 并 supplies the sound (bìng → pīn, b/p drift) and a perfect semantic match — to combine, to merge side by side. 扌 + 并 = the hands that put things together. Among the cleanest phono-semantic matches in everyday Mandarin, both meanings reinforcing each other.