noun HSK 4 #793

Meanings

  1. 1 bottom; base; underside
  2. 2 background (of a picture, fabric, design)
  3. 3 foundation; underlying basis
  4. 4 draft; copy kept as record
  5. 5 end (of a year or month)
  6. 6 radix; base (mathematics)

Examples

到底怎么回事
Dàodǐ zěnme huíshì?
What on earth is going on?
Hǎidǐ shìjiè hěn měi.
The seabed world is beautiful.
Gōngsī niándǐ hěn máng.
The company is busy at year-end.

Tips

usage
anchors a wide family of 'bottom / base' compounds across literal and figurative space: physical (海底 seabed, 脚底 sole, 鞋底 shoe sole), temporal (年底 year-end, 月底 month-end), figurative (底线 bottom line, 底气 inner confidence, 底蕴 cultural depth), and intensifier (到底 on earth / after all, 彻底 thoroughly).
register
has a second reading de (toneless), an archaic equivalent of the modern possessive particle . You will only see it in pre-modern texts — Republican-era essays, classical-flavored writing, or older translations. In all contemporary Chinese, write instead. No modern compound uses this reading.
memory
Picture a building's foundation: 广 is the shelter roof above, (low / base) sits underneath — the lowest part inside the shelter. The phonetic also means 'low,' so sound and meaning point the same way.

Components

radical
广 yǎn
shelter; lean-to
Outer indexing shelter radical 广 (Kangxi #53) — a roof with one wall, a lean-to or open-sided building. Frames as something inside an enclosed space. Same radical anchors (shop), (courtyard), (bed), (warehouse) — all bounded interior spaces, where the bottom of the room is the natural reference of .
phonetic
low; foundation
Inner component supplies the sound: → dǐ (just a tone shift). itself meant 'low / base' (a hand pressing down to a fixed point), so it doubles as a tight semantic match — 'the low part inside a building' = the bottom. Same phonetic in (low), (resist), (residence).

Stroke Order