Kilo Lingo

(shuō) - to say, to speak in Mandarin

shuō

Traditional: 說

Line drawing of 说
Coloured illustration of 说
HSK 1
#19 of 5,000 Core 1000

Translation

to say, to speak

Word origin

說 (shuō) means 'to say, to speak'. It is a phono-semantic compound with 言 (speech) as the meaning radical and 兌 (duì) as the phonetic component.

Origin
phono-semantic compound
Root
言 (speech radical) + 兌 (duì, phonetic)

Stroke order

Stroke order for 说

Examples

He says he is very busy.

Please speak a bit more slowly.

Please speak slowly.

The teacher is speaking English.

She did not say anything.

说 (shuō) means to say or to speak and is one of the most used verbs in Mandarin.

Appears in 12 words

Multi-character compounds in the corpus that contain 说.

Used in

Grammar articles

(16)

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This word is part of lesson 1.