吧 (bā): bar; pub

Meanings

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

Characters

吧

bā

bar; pub

Examples

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.

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.

吧！门一下关上了。

Bā! mén yīxià guānshàng le.

Bang! The door slammed shut.

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.