看不起
kàn bu qǐ · HSK 4
to look down upon
👎 看 (look) + 不起 (cannot afford/lift up) = look-down-on
The 不起 suffix means 'cannot bear/afford', so 看不起 literally is 'cannot bring oneself to look up to' someone. Compare 买不起 (cannot afford to buy) — same 不起 pattern of inability or unworthiness.
看 — hand 手 over eye 目
看 is an associative compound showing a hand (手, simplified to 龹) shading an eye (目), depicting someone shielding their eyes to look into the distance. From this concrete gesture it broadened to mean 'to look,' 'to watch,' and later 'to read' or 'to consider.'
不 — single pictograph; bird flying upward
Originally a pictograph in oracle bone script, traditionally interpreted as a bird flying up toward the sky and unable to come down, suggesting negation or refusal. Over time it became the standard negation word in Chinese, used before verbs and adjectives to mean 'not'.
起 — 走 (run) + 己 (self/phonetic)
起 combines 走 'run/walk' as the meaning component with 己 as the phonetic component. The 走 element suggests movement of the body, giving the core sense of rising up or starting to move. From there it extended to meanings like 'get up,' 'begin,' and 'arise.'