没 (mò): to drown

Meanings

1 to drown
2 to sink; to submerge
3 to inundate; to flood over
4 to disappear; to fade away
5 to confiscate; to seize
6 to end; to die

Characters

没

mò

to drown

Examples

洪水淹没了村庄。

Hóngshuǐ yān mò le cūnzhuāng.

The flood submerged the village.

积雪没过了膝盖。

Jīxuě mò guò le xīgài.

The accumulated snow rose past our knees.

海关没收了他的护照。

Hǎiguān mòshōu le tā de hùzhào.

Customs confiscated his passport.

Tips

usage

The mò reading is the older, literal sense of the character: water rising up over something. It survives in a small set of mostly literary or formal compounds — 淹没 (to submerge), 沉没 (to sink), 出没 (to appear and disappear), 埋没 (to bury / stifle talent), 没落 (to decline) — plus the legal/administrative 没收 (to confiscate). In everyday speech the méi reading dominates; mò is what dictionaries and news write.

mistakes

Learners reflexively read 没 as méi because that's the high-frequency negative-prefix reading. But in compounds about sinking, submerging, vanishing, or seizing — 淹没, 沉没, 出没, 埋没, 没落, 没收 — the reading is mò. Rule of thumb: if 没 carries lexical meaning (sinks, confiscates) rather than negating, it's mò.

Components

radical

氵 shuǐ

water (left-side radical)

Three-drop water radical on the left — the side-form of 水. Marks 没 as historically water-related: the original meaning under the mò reading was 'to sink, submerge, be drowned by water'. Same family as 沉 (to sink), 浸 (to soak), 淹 (to submerge). The everyday méi negation sense ('not, have not') is a much later semantic extension from 'gone, vanished beneath the waves'.

phonetic

殳 shū

spear; hand with weapon

Right side 殳 supplies the sound, though after multiple historical drifts (shū → mò → méi) the modern reading is no longer obviously linked. 殳 itself depicts a hand 又 holding a long-handled weapon. In 没 it originally pictured a hand reaching down to grasp something underwater — a swimmer or diver going under. Same phonetic appears in 殁 (to die).

In Pop Culture

熊出没 Xióng Chūmò

Boonie Bears (Chinese animated series, since 2012)

Long-running cartoon about two bears defending their forest from a hapless logger. The title uses the mò reading: 出没 = 'appearing and disappearing', so the title reads 'bears about'.