tuó
noun #32,617

Meanings

  1. 1 steelyard weight (the sliding weight on a 杆秤 traditional balance)
  2. 2 stone roller (used to flatten roads or grain fields)
  3. 3 (verb) to grind or polish jade with an emery wheel

Examples

HSK 7-9
Gǎn chèng shàng de chèng tuó kěyǐ zuǒyòu yídòng.
The weight on a steelyard balance can slide back and forth.
HSK 7-9
Gōngjiàng yòng tuó tuó zhuómó zhèkuài yù.
The craftsman polishes this jade with an emery wheel.

Tips

culture
The 秤砣 is the sliding weight that gives the traditional Chinese 杆秤 (hand-held steelyard balance) its precision; markets used these well into the 20th century. Hence the saying 秤砣千斤 "a steelyard weight is small but balances a thousand jin" = "small but mighty".
memory
= "stone" (radical) + (tā, phonetic). The radical pins down "something heavy and stone-like"; the phonetic shifts from tā to tuó (a common shift for the phonetic series, e.g. "camel"). All real-world uses come back to a heavy round object: balance weight, road roller, grinding wheel.

Components

radical
shí
stone
Stone radical on the left, the indexing radical. A is the heavy sliding stone weight on a steelyard balance, or a stone roller used to crush grain; both objects are literally stones, so the radical does straightforward semantic work here.
phonetic
it (phonetic)
Right side supplies the tā sound, which shifted to tuó in 's reading. The "it" meaning isn't loaded here; treat it as a pure phonetic. Same tuó/tā cluster shows up in camel and ostrich, all bearing this graphic root.

Stroke Order

tuó