verb HSK 2 #1,451

Meanings

  1. 1 to crawl
  2. 2 to climb

Characters

Contains (claw) + (cling) — clinging with claws.

Examples

Bǎobao huì pá le.
The baby can crawl now.
Wǒmen pá shàng le shāndǐng.
We climbed to the top of the mountain.
Māo pá shàng le shù.
The cat climbed up the tree.

Components

radical
zhǎo
claw; talon (radical)
Top radical — a clawed hand reaching down, three angled strokes plus the curved palm. Indexing radical for and the perfect semantic match: crawling and climbing both rely on hooking your claws into something. Same radical drives (grab), (search), (receive), (love — historically a hand offering).
phonetic
snake; cling to (phonetic)
Right-bottom phonetic supplies the sound (bā → pá, a related labial reading). originally pictured a coiled snake or a lizard-like creature clinging to surfaces, so it bleeds a strong semantic flavour: clinging, latching on. Same phonetic appears in (grasp), (suggestion particle), (father).

Stroke Order