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

HSK 1

我们拼车去机场吧。

Wǒmen pīnchē qù jīchǎng ba.

Let's share a ride to the airport.

HSK 3

孩子在拼拼图。

Háizi zài pīn pīntú.

The child is doing a puzzle.

HSK 5

就业竞争这么激烈，年轻人不得不拼。

Jiùyè jìngzhēng zhème jīliè, niánqīngrén bùdébù pīn.

Job competition is so fierce that young people have no choice but to go all out.

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.