zuō
verb #39,233

Meanings

  1. 1 to suck (with the mouth)
  2. 2 to gnaw; to eat ravenously

Examples

Yīng'ér zhèng shǐjìn zuō zhe nǎipíng.
The baby is sucking hard at the milk bottle.

Tips

history
is an uncommon character. The colloquial reading zuō means 'to suck' (a baby at the breast, sucking a sweet); a separate literary reading chuài means 'to gnaw / eat greedily'. Built on the mouth radical with phonetic .
memory
Mouth radical plus : pulling at something with the mouth as hard as you possibly can.

Components

radical
kǒu
mouth
The 'mouth' radical marks as an action of the mouth and is its indexing radical.
phonetic
zuì
most; (here) phonetic
The element supplies the sound for ; it is purely phonetic, the reading drifted from the modern value.

Stroke Order

zuō