拾 (shí): to pick up; to collect; to gath…

Meanings

1 to pick up; to collect; to gather
2 ten (capital/banker's form, used on checks to prevent fraud)

Characters

拾

shí

to pick up; to collect; ten (financial)

Examples

HSK 1

他拾起地上的钱包。

Tā shí qǐ dìshàng de qiánbāo.

He picked up the wallet on the ground.

HSK 7-9

拾金不昧是好品德。

Shíjīnbúmèi shì hǎo pǐndé.

Returning found money is a good virtue.

HSK 7-9

支票上写的是'拾万元'。

Zhīpiào shàng xiě de shì ' shí wàn yuán '.

The check says 'one hundred thousand yuan' (using the formal character).

Tips

usage

拾 as 'pick up' is more literary than 捡. In everyday speech, people say 捡起来 rather than 拾起来. But the idiom 拾金不昧 always uses 拾.

usage

As an anti-fraud number, 拾 = 10 (instead of 十). It's harder to alter on checks because it has more strokes. Other banker's numbers: 壹贰叁肆伍陆柒捌玖拾.

Components

radical

扌 shǒu

hand (left-side radical of 手)

Left hand radical, the compressed left-side form of 手. Indexes 拾 in the vast hand-action family (拿 hold, 推 push, 拉 pull) and signals a physical gesture: bending down and using the fingers to gather things up off the ground.

phonetic

合 hé

to close; to join (here phonetic)

Right 合 - a lid 亼 over a mouth 口, picturing things brought together. Supplies the sound hé to shí through a well-attested classical alternation (same drift in 拾 used as the formal numeral 'ten,' written on checks to prevent altering 十 to a larger figure). Faint semantic flavour too: scooping items into one closed handful.