拉 (lā) · to pull, to drag, to play (a bowed instrument)

Meanings

1 to pull
2 to drag
3 to play (a bowed instrument)
4 to chat
5 to defecate

Characters

拉

lā

to pull; to drag

Examples

HSK 2

请拉门。

Qǐng lā mén.

Please pull the door.

HSK 3

别拉我，咱们拉一会儿。

Bié lā wǒ, zánmen lā yíhuìr.

Don't pull me - let's chat for a while.

HSK 7-9

爷爷会拉二胡。

Yéye huì lā èrhú.

My grandfather can play the erhu.

Tips

usage

拉 is the opposite of 推 (push). Doors in China usually show one or the other to tell you which way to open them.

usage

For bowed strings the verb is 拉 (you literally drag the bow): 拉小提琴 (play violin), 拉二胡. Plucked strings use 弹 instead.

register

拉 also covers two reading-edge cases. As a colloquial verb it means to defecate (拉屎, 拉肚子 = to have diarrhoea) - fine in casual speech, off-limits in formal writing. A rising-tone reading lá means to slit or gash (拉一个口子 = to make a cut) - treated as a separate entry. A rare fourth-tone reading là survives only in the dialect word 拉拉蛄 (mole cricket) and as a variant of 落 in a handful of fixed phrases.

Components

radical

扌 shǒu

hand (radical form of 手)

Left-side hand radical, the side form of 手. Anchors 拉 in the manual-action family - pulling, dragging, tugging are core hand activities. Same radical drives 推 (push), 抓 (grab), 扔 (throw), 打 (hit). Provides essentially all the meaning while 立 just supplies sound.

phonetic

立 lì

to stand

Right side 立 supplies the sound (lì → lā, just a tone shift). 立 itself pictures a person planted firmly on the ground. Faint semantic flavour: pulling something requires bracing yourself - 'standing your ground' to drag. Same phonetic in 粒 (grain) and 位 (position).