lěi / lèi / léi
verb #1,222

Meanings

  1. 1 to accumulate; to build up
  2. 2 to involve; to implicate; to drag (someone) into trouble
  3. 3 continuous; repeated

Examples

HSK 3
Duìbuqǐ, liánlěi le nǐ.
Sorry to drag you into this.
HSK 7-9
Zhīshi rì jī yuè lěi.
Knowledge accumulates day by day, month by month.
HSK 7-9
Lěijì lìrùn dádào yī yì.
Cumulative profit reached one hundred million.

Tips

usage
Two senses live under lěi: 'pile up over time' (积累, 累计, 日积月累) and 'pile trouble onto someone' (拖累, 连累). Both come from the same image - stacking things up - but the second sense narrows to the burden you transfer to others.
mistakes
Don't read 积累 as jīlèi. The tired- (lèi) is a feeling; the accumulate- (lěi) is an action. Same character, different verb, different tone.

Components

radical
silk thread
Bottom indexing silk radical . Silk thread ties the cocoons into a stack - the action of binding, repeating, piling up. Same radical family: , , .
semantic
tián
field (here: bundle of cocoons)
Top 5 strokes - graphically (field), but historically a stack of silk cocoons. The accumulate sense fits the original picture cleanly: heaping bundles one on top of another.

Stroke Order

lěi