坪 (píng): a plain / flat land

Measure Word

一块坪 kuài

Meanings

1 a plain / flat land
2 ping (unit of area, approx. 3.3 sq meters, used in Japan and Taiwan)

Characters

坪

píng

flat land / plain / ping (area unit)

Examples

这间公寓大约有三十坪。

Zhè jiān gōngyù dàyuē yǒu sānshí píng.

This apartment is about thirty ping in size.

草坪上铺满了绿色的草皮。

Cǎopíng shàngpū mǎn le lǜsè de cǎopí.

The lawn was covered with green turf.

Tips

culture

In Taiwan and Japan, 坪 (ping) is a common unit for measuring floor area in real estate. One ping equals approximately 3.3058 square meters or about 35.6 square feet.

Components

radical

土 tǔ

earth; soil

Left earth radical — a mound of soil on the ground line, the indexing radical. Anchors 坪 in the family of terrain words: 地 land, 场 field, 坡 slope, 坎 pit. Marks the meaning of flat open ground as a feature of the earth.

phonetic

平 píng

flat; level

Right 平 supplies both sound and meaning — píng exactly, and the core sense of flatness. Earth (土) + flat (平) yields 'flat ground,' a tidy semantic doubling. Same phonetic family: 评 to comment, 苹 apple, 萍 duckweed. A model phono-semantic compound where the phonetic happens to be perfectly semantic too.