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

HSK 5

海关没收了他的护照。

Hǎiguān mòshōu le tā de hùzhào.

Customs confiscated his passport.

HSK 6

洪水淹没了村庄。

Hóngshuǐ yān mò le cūnzhuāng.

The flood submerged the village.

HSK 7-9

积雪没过了膝盖。

Jīxuě mò guò le xīgài.

The accumulated snow rose past our knees.

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'.