吊销
diào xiāo · HSK 7
to revoke
🚫 DIAO away your license, XIAO — canceled and gone
Diao sounds like 'drop' — your license drops away. Xiao sounds like 'shiao' as in 'shiao-t out' — erased. Hang (吊) + cancel (销): they hang up your permit and wipe it from the books.
吊 — 口 mouth on top + 巾 cloth below
Originally a pictograph showing a person hanging by a rope, depicting the act of suspending or hanging. Over time it came to mean 'to hang, suspend' and by extension 'to mourn' (since mourners would hang offerings). The modern form 吊 replaced the older 弔, which showed a person wrapped in cords.
销 — metal radical 钅 + 肖 xiāo (phonetic)
销 is a semantic-phonetic compound. The metal radical 钅 (金) signals a meaning related to metal, while 肖 supplies the sound xiāo. It originally meant to melt or smelt metal, then extended figuratively to 'dissolve away,' and later to modern senses like 'sell' (move goods away) and 'cancel/expend.'