抄
chāo · HSK 4
to make a copy
✋📋 扌(hand) + 少 (shǎo, few) — hand grabs a few pages to copy
The hand radical 扌shows the action; 少 doubles as a rough phonetic (shǎo → chāo). Meaning fans out from hand-copying text to grabbing/raiding — same idea of a hand quickly taking what it wants.
抄 — hand radical 扌 + 少 (shǎo, phonetic)
A semantic-phonetic compound: the hand radical 扌 signals an action done by hand, while 少 supplies the sound. The original sense was to grab or scoop up by hand, which extended to 'copy out' (transcribe by hand) and later to stir-frying — quickly tossing food with a hand motion.