吧 (bā) · bar; pub

Meanings

1 bar; pub
2 to puff
3 bang; smack
4 Tieba sub-forum

Characters

吧

bā

bar; pub

Examples

HSK 3

我们昨晚去酒吧喝了几杯。

Wǒmen zuówǎn qù jiǔbā hē le jǐ bēi.

We went to a bar for a couple of drinks last night.

HSK 3

吧！门一下关上了。

Bā! mén yíxià guānshàng le.

Bang! The door slammed shut.

HSK 6

他年轻的时候常泡网吧打游戏。

Tā niánqīng de shíhou cháng pào wǎngbā dǎ yóuxì.

When he was young he often hung out at internet cafes playing games.

Tips

history

First-tone 吧 is one of the cleanest English loanwords in Chinese. The character was repurposed in the early twentieth century to transliterate the syllable 'bar', then quickly anchored a whole modern-life family: 酒吧 (bar), 网吧 (internet cafe), 咖啡吧 (coffee bar), 吧台 (bar counter). Once Baidu launched its forum platform 贴吧 in 2003, bā picked up a second life as 'sub-forum' - hence 吧主 (forum moderator) and 吧友 (fellow forum member). A rare third reading 吧 (smack!) is recorded in dictionaries but almost never seen outside dialect transcription.

mistakes

Tone makes the meaning. First-tone 吧 is this concrete noun ('bar', 'puff', 'bang'); toneless 吧 is the sentence-softening particle on a separate page. Rule of thumb: if 吧 stands inside a noun (酒吧, 网吧, 吧台) or kicks off an onomatopoeic sound, it's bā. If it sits at the end of a sentence softening the mood, it's ba.

Components

radical

口 kǒu

mouth

Left mouth-radical - the indexing radical. As in most modern sentence-final particles (啊, 呢, 吗, 啦), the mouth-radical signals 'this is something said aloud' - a verbal tag rather than a content word. Stages 吧 as a pure spoken modulator.

phonetic

巴 bā

to hope for; tail

Right 巴 supplies the sound (bā, neutralised to toneless ba in the particle reading and preserved as bā in the loanword 'bar' reading). Same phonetic in 把, 爸, 疤. Semantically empty here - 吧 is a phonetic loan: ancient writers needed a graph for the suggestion-particle and grafted 巴 onto a mouth.

In Pop Culture

贴吧 Tiēbā

Tieba (Baidu's post bar)

Baidu's flagship forum platform, launched 2003. Every topic gets its own bā ('bar'), making 吧 the everyday word for sub-forum in Chinese internet slang.