埋 (mái): to bury; to cover with earth

Meanings

1 to bury; to cover with earth
2 to hide; to conceal

Characters

埋

mái

to bury; to hide

土 (earth) + 里 (inside) - put inside the earth.

Examples

HSK 4

狗把骨头埋在了院子里。

Gǒu bǎ gǔtou mái zài le yuànzi lǐ.

The dog buried the bone in the yard.

HSK 5

别把真相埋起来。

Bié bǎ zhēnxiàng mái qǐlai.

Don't bury the truth.

HSK 7-9

这里埋着很多宝藏。

Zhèlǐ mái zhe hěn duō bǎozàng.

There are many treasures buried here.

Tips

usage

Core verb 'to put under earth' - literal in 埋葬 (bury the dead), 活埋 (bury alive), 掩埋 (cover over); figurative in 埋头 (head-down, engrossed), 埋伏 (ambush), 埋没 (let talent go unrecognized).

mistakes

Polyphone alert: read mán (2nd tone) ONLY inside 埋怨 (complain, blame). Every other compound - 埋藏, 埋伏, 埋单 - reads mái. Frequent HSK test point.

Components

radical

土 tǔ

earth; soil

Left earth radical - the indexing radical and literal meaning anchor. To bury is to place something into the soil, so the radical names the medium. Pulls 埋 into the ground-related verb family alongside 坑 (pit), 填 (fill), 挖 (dig), 堆 (pile up).

phonetic

里 lǐ

inside; village

Right component supplies a rough sound (里 → mái, an irregular but historically attested phonetic shift) plus a strong semantic hint of 'inside'. Earth + inside = placed inside the earth, a near-perfect ideographic image of burial. The phonetic-semantic combination is unusually transparent.