How to Write 咑 (dā) — Meaning “da (onomatopoeia for driving horses or machine guns)”

Imagine a horse-drawn cart going "da-da-da"—the mouth 口 is on the left, and on the right you can see a big (大) stick hitting a nail (the bottom horizontal line) to create the sound. This links the shape to the driving-horse onomatopoeia.

Keep the left mouth radical small and placed at the upper-left. The right part should have 大 with a long horizontal stroke at the bottom, not too short. A common mistake is making the right side too wide or forgetting the bottom horizontal line.

咑 uses 大 plus a bottom horizontal on the right, while 吁 has 于 (yú) and 吂 has 亡 (wáng). Visually, 咑 has an extra horizontal stroke below 大. Functionally, 咑 is an onomatopoeia, 吁 means to sigh or shout, and 吂 is a rare character for blind or ignorant.

咑 is very rare and mainly appears in written onomatopoeia, like 咑咑 for machine-gun fire or horse galloping, and 咑的一声 for a whip crack. It is not in common vocabulary or HSK lists, so you might encounter it in old stories or sound descriptions.

Common words containing 咑 include: 咑咑 (dā dā) — da-da (sound of machine gun or galloping); 咑的一声 (dā de yī shēng) — with a crack; 咑响 (dā xiǎng) — to crack (like a whip).