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累

lèi / lěi / léi
adjective HSK 1 #1,222

Meanings

  1. 1 tired; weary
  2. 2 to tire; to wear out
  3. 3 to work hard; to strain

Examples

我好累。
Wǒ hǎo lèi.
I'm so tired.
今天累不累？
Jīntiān lèi bu lèi?
Are you tired today?
累死了！
Lèisǐle!
Exhausted! (lit. tired to death)

Tips

usage
累 has three readings. lèi (this entry) = tired / to tire — by far the most common in modern speech (我好累, 心累). lěi = to accumulate / implicate (积累, 拖累). léi = piled-up / a burden, mostly literary (累累, 累赘). Tap the pinyin on each compound to see which reading it uses.
usage
The X+死了 pattern is a hyperbolic intensifier — 累死了 (dead tired), 热死了 (boiling hot), 饿死了 (starving), 气死了 (furious). Everyday colloquial, not literal.

Components

radical
糸 mì
silk thread
Bottom indexing silk radical 糸 (Kangxi #120) — pictograph of twisted silk strands. Anchors 累 in the textile / bundling family alongside 系, 紧, 素. Bundles tied with silk thread = piling things up = the burden of a heavy load = 'tired.'
semantic
田 tián
field (here: bundle of cocoons)
Top 5 strokes — graphically 田 (field), but historically a stack of silk cocoons. The original 累 depicted three cocoons above a thread — the picture of bundling silk together. Modern simplification reduced the three to one. Read this slot as 'a piled bundle' rather than 'field.'

Stroke Order

累 lèi