高 (gāo): tall

Meanings

1 tall
2 high

Characters

高

gāo

tall; high

Pictograph of a tall building or watchtower

Examples

HSK 1

你有多高？

Nǐ yǒu duō gāo?

How tall are you?

HSK 1

他比我高。

Tā bǐ wǒ gāo.

He is taller than me.

HSK 2

那座山很高。

Nà zuò shān hěn gāo.

That mountain is very high.

Tips

usage

高 is used broadly: 高兴 (happy), 高中 (high school), 高速 (high speed), 提高 (to improve). The opposite is 矮 (short in height) for people, or 低 (low) for things.

culture

高 is a common Chinese surname. The famous football coach Gao Lin (高林) and many historical figures share this name.

Components

pictograph

高 gāo

tall; high

Self-component. Oracle-bone 高 depicts a multi-tier watchtower - a roof (亠), upper chamber (口), canopy (冖), and lower chamber with a doorway. The ten-stroke silhouette grounds 'high, tall' in a concrete picture of an ancient pavilion. 高 is itself Kangxi radical 189 and shares its tower-shape ancestry with 亭 pavilion and 京 capital.

Radical

Tall Kangxi #189

Pictograph of a multi-tier watchtower or tall pavilion. As an indexing radical 高 is unusually unproductive — almost no common modern compounds use it as the semantic key. Its weight in the language comes from 高 itself plus rich derivative pairs (高兴, 高速, 提高) where 高 acts as a content morpheme rather than a radical.