搜 (sōu): to search; to look for

Meanings

1 to search; to look for

Characters

搜

sōu

to search; to look for

Examples

警察搜了他的房间。

Jǐngchá sōu le tā de fángjiān.

The police searched his room.

搜一下这个词。

Sōu yīxià zhège cí.

Search for this word.

我在网上搜了半天。

Wǒ zài wǎngshàng sōu le bàntiān.

I searched online for ages.

Tips

usage

搜 is the informal short form commonly used in daily speech. 搜索 is the more complete/formal version. In Chinese internet slang, '搜一下' is like saying 'Google it.'

Components

radical

扌 shǒu

hand (radical form)

Left hand radical — simplified 3-stroke form of 手. The indexing radical. Searching is a manual rummaging action, so the hand is literal. Same radical heads 找, 拿, 抓, 摸 — the family of hand-driven verbs that also includes 搜's near-synonym 找 'look for'.

phonetic

叟 sǒu

old man; elder

Right component supplies the sound (sǒu → sōu, just a tone shift). 叟 itself shows a hand 又 holding a torch under a 宀-like roof — an elder lighting a search of the house, which is sometimes read as a faint semantic echo of 'searching by torchlight'. Same phonetic in 嗖, 飕, 馊.