adjective #17,148

Meanings

  1. 1 weary; tired; fatigued

Examples

HSK 6
Tā pǎo de jīngpí-lìjìn.
He ran until he was completely exhausted.
HSK 7-9
Chángtú báshè ràng tā shēnxīn jù pí.
The long journey left him physically and mentally exhausted.

Tips

usage
rarely appears alone in modern Chinese. It's most commonly seen in compounds: 疲劳 (fatigued), 疲倦 (weary), 精疲力尽 (utterly exhausted), 乐此不疲 (to enjoy without tiring of it).

Components

radical
sickness; illness
Outer sickness radical - a stylized bed-on-its-side with a person leaning against it, picturing someone laid up ill. The indexing radical, files in the family of illness/symptom chars: illness, pain, ache, disease, scar. Marks fatigue as a body's near-pathological state, treated by classical medicine as something to recover from.
phonetic
skin
Inner supplies the sound - pí exactly, no shift. The 'skin' meaning adds a faint semantic flavor: exhaustion that shows on the surface, in the face and limbs. Same phonetic family: that one, by / quilt, wave, glass, broken. Mnemonic: when ill () and your skin () is dragging - you are tired.

Stroke Order