verb HSK 2 #1,451

Meanings

  1. 1 to crawl
  2. 2 to climb

Characters

Contains (claw) + (cling) - clinging with claws.

Examples

HSK 2
Māo pá shàng le shù.
The cat climbed up the tree.
HSK 4
Bǎobao huì pá le.
The baby can crawl now.
HSK 7-9
Wǒmen pá shàng le shāndǐng.
We climbed to the top of the mountain.

Components

radical
zhǎo
claw; talon (radical)
Top radical - a clawed hand reaching down, three angled strokes plus the curved palm. Indexing radical for and the perfect semantic match: crawling and climbing both rely on hooking your claws into something. Same radical drives (grab), (search), (receive), (love - historically a hand offering).
phonetic
snake; cling to
Right-bottom phonetic supplies the sound (bā → pá, a related labial reading). originally pictured a coiled snake or a lizard-like creature clinging to surfaces, so it bleeds a strong semantic flavour: clinging, latching on. Same phonetic appears in (grasp), (suggestion particle), (father).

Stroke Order