丢掉
diū diào · HSK 7
to throw away
🗑️ 丢 throw + 掉 drop — toss it and let it fall away
丢 alone means to lose or toss. 掉 means to fall or drop off. Together they reinforce getting rid of something completely — thrown and dropped away for good.
丢 — 丿 stroke + 去 (to go away)
丢 is a relatively late character formed by adding a downward stroke 丿 on top of 去 ('to go/leave'). The composition visually suggests something departing or slipping away, reinforcing the meaning 'to lose' or 'to throw away'. It is not an ancient pictograph but a modern semantic compound.
掉 — hand radical 扌 + 卓 (zhuō, tall)
A semantic-phonetic compound: the hand radical 扌 signals a manual action, while 卓 supplies the sound (originally zhuō, later shifted to diào). The early sense was 'to swing or shake by hand,' which extended to 'drop, fall, lose,' and in modern Chinese also 'to exchange' or 'to turn around.'