攀 (pān): to climb

Meanings

1 to climb
2 to cling to
3 to seek connections with (someone of higher status)

Characters

攀

pān

climb; pull oneself up

Examples

他攀上了山顶。

Tā pān shàng le shāndǐng.

He climbed to the top of the mountain.

不要总想着攀高枝。

Bùyào zǒng xiǎng zhe pāngāozhī.

Do not always try to climb the social ladder.

Tips

usage

攀 has both a physical meaning (to climb by pulling oneself up) and a social meaning (to seek connections with people of higher status). 攀比 (to compare oneself with others), 攀登 (to climb/scale), 攀亲 (to claim kinship) are common compounds.

memory

The character 攀 shows two 木 (trees) with hands — pulling yourself up between trees = climbing.

Components

radical

手 shǒu

hand

Bottom hand — the full standalone form of 手 rather than the side variant 扌, sitting beneath the rest of the character. Reinforces the manual nature of climbing: 攀 always involves the hands gripping, pulling, and hoisting the body upward, as in 攀登 to climb and 攀岩 to rock-climb.

phonetic

樊 fán

fence; cage (here phonetic-semantic)

Top 樊 — two hands grasping a wooden lattice, originally a fence or thorny enclosure. Supplies the sound fán drifting to pān, and feeds the meaning visually: hands gripping the lattice are exactly the climbing posture. With 手 below, the whole is hand-over-hand ascent.