瘸 (qué): lame

Meanings

1 lame
2 crippled

Characters

瘸

qué

lame; crippled

Examples

他的左腿瘸了。

Tā de zuǒtuǐ qué le.

His left leg is lame.

那个老人走路一瘸一拐的。

Nàge lǎorén zǒulù yī qué yī guǎi de.

That old man walks with a limp.

Tips

memory

瘸 has the illness radical 疒 on top, showing it's a physical condition. The bottom part 却 gives the sound.

Components

radical

疒 nè

sickness (Kangxi #104)

Sickness radical wrapping the upper-left - pictograph of a person lying on a bed, the cap for everything illness-related (病 ill, 疼 ache, 痛 pain, 疯 mad). Nicknamed 病字头. Here it marks 瘸 as a physical impairment of the body rather than a moral or social one.

phonetic

加 jiā

to add (phonetic)

Inside top-right 加 supplies the sound - jiā drifts to qué through a long historical shift that obscured the link. Treat this strictly as a phonetic placeholder; the 'to add' meaning of 加 contributes nothing semantically to 瘸.

semantic

肉 ròu

meat; flesh

Inside bottom 肉 - flesh in its full standalone form (rare full 肉 rather than side-form ⺼). Puts the meaning squarely on the body: lameness is a defect of the leg's flesh. The full combination reads as 'a flesh-condition under the sickness shed,' an apt picture of someone limping.