píng
noun #19,784

Meanings

  1. 1 apple (used in 苹果)

Examples

Wǒ xiǎng chī píngguǒ.
I want to eat an apple.
Píngguǒ hěn tián.
The apple is very sweet.

Tips

usage
is almost exclusively used in the word 苹果 (apple). It does not appear independently in modern Chinese.

Components

radical
cǎo
grass; plant (top radical)
Top grass radical — the standard 3-stroke compressed form of . Indexes in the plant family. Originally named a water plant (similar to clover); in modern Mandarin it survives almost exclusively in the compound 苹果 píngguǒ, apple — the "flat fruit" by folk-etymology.
phonetic
píng
flat; level
Bottom supplies the sound píng directly, no drift. also adds a faint semantic image — an apple has a flat-ish profile compared to peaches and pears. Same phonetic powers comment, itself, duckweed; in this character it is pure phonetic with happy semantic accident.

Stroke Order

píng