掉头
diào toú · HSK 7
to turn round
🔄 drop your head's direction = flip around and go the other way
掉 means to drop or swap, 头 means head. Together: swap which way your head faces, i.e. do a U-turn. Think of it as dropping your current heading to pick up the opposite one.
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.'
头 — 页 (head/page) + 豆 (bean, phonetic)
The traditional form 頭 combines 頁 (xié), meaning 'head', with 豆 (dòu) as the phonetic component. 頁 itself originally depicted a person with an emphasized head. The simplified form 头 is a modern shorthand that replaces 豆+頁 with a simpler shape while keeping the same meaning of 'head' or 'top'.