忘掉
wàng diào · HSK 7
to forget
🧠 忘 = 亡 lose + 心 heart; 掉 = drop off — what the heart loses drops away
掉 is a resultative ending meaning off or away, so 忘掉 stresses forgetting completely rather than just 忘 alone. Sound: wàng diào, with diào the same off as in diū diào, to lose for good.
忘 — 亡 (lose/perish) on top + 心 (heart) on bottom
忘 is a semantic-phonetic compound. The bottom 心 (heart/mind) gives the meaning, since forgetting happens in the mind, while the top 亡 (to lose, perish) supplies both the sound and the sense of something gone. Together they depict a thought lost from the heart — to forget.
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.'