百 (bǎi): hundred

Meanings

1 hundred

Characters

百

bǎi

hundred

一 (one) on top of 白 — one step above white means a hundred.

Examples

一百块钱。

Yìbǎi kuài qián.

One hundred yuan.

他跑了三百米。

Tā pǎo le sānbǎi mǐ.

He ran three hundred meters.

Tips

grammar

Chinese numbers are straightforward: 一百 (100), 两百 (200), 三百 (300). Note: use 两, not 二, for 200.

culture

百度 (literally 'hundred times') is China's largest search engine — the Chinese equivalent of Google. The name comes from a classical poem about searching hundreds of times.

Components

radical

白 bái

white; bright

The white radical anchors 百 as its dictionary index and supplies the phonetic shape that drifted to 'bǎi'. Traditionally read as 'one (一) plus white (白) = a clean round hundred', the cap-and-body combination is a textbook radical-plus-marker decomposition.

ideograph

一 yī

one

A single horizontal stroke on top, marking the unit 'one' that turns 白 (hundred-count) into 100. The cap acts as a small accent over the body — one more than ninety-nine, the symbolic completion of a count.