关掉
guān diào · HSK 7
to switch off
🔌 关 = shut + 掉 = off-and-gone; 掉 marks the action completed away
关 alone means close or shut. Adding 掉 (drop, remove) turns it into shutting something off for good, so 关掉 is the full off-and-done state of a light, app, or machine.
关 — door 门 + simplified 关 inside
关 is the simplified form of 關. The traditional character showed a gate (門) with a bolt or crossbar inside, depicting a barred door — hence 'to close' or 'shut'. Meaning later extended to 'pass' (a guarded gate), 'barrier', and figuratively 'concern' or 'connection'.
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.'