bǎng
noun #36,735

Meanings

  1. 1 upper arm; shoulder
  2. 2 wing (of a bird or insect)

Examples

Tā bǎngdàyāoyuán, yí kàn jiùshì liàn jiā zi.
He's broad-shouldered and thick-waisted — clearly a trained fighter.
Niǎor zhǎnkāi chìbǎng fēi zǒu le.
The bird spread its wings and flew away.

Tips

usage
has multiple readings: bǎng = shoulder/wing (most common), pāng = swollen/puffy (e.g. 'face is puffy'), páng = used in 膀胱 (pángguāng, bladder), and bàng in the slang 膀子 (diào bàngzi, to flirt). Context decides.
memory
Radical (flesh) + phonetic (páng → bǎng). marks body parts; pair it with 'side' and you get 'the thing on the side of your torso' — your shoulder/arm.

Components

radical
ròu
flesh; meat (body radical, side form)
Left meat-flesh radical — the side form of , indexing as a body-part word. Visually identical to (moon) but semantically distinct: -meat anchors anatomy chars like chest, back, organ, foot, liver, face. Marks as a part of the human body — the shoulder or upper arm.
phonetic
páng
side; beside
Right supplies the sound — páng shifting to bǎng with consonant change. means 'side / beside,' which also fits the meaning beautifully: the shoulder is the body part to your side. Mnemonic and etymology aligned. Same phonetic appears in list, slander, () crab. One of the cleaner phono-semantic pairs in the anatomy lexicon.

Stroke Order

bǎng