瞧不起
qiáo bù qǐ · HSK 7
to look down upon
👎 瞧 look + 不 not + 起 up = cannot look UP to someone, so you look down on them
The literal pieces are look-not-up. When you can't bring yourself to look up to a person, you hold them in contempt. The bù qǐ pattern marks an action you're unable to complete.
瞧 — eye radical 目 + 焦 (jiāo, phonetic)
瞧 is a semantic-phonetic compound. The 目 (eye) radical signals meaning related to looking or seeing, while 焦 supplies the sound (jiāo → qiáo). It's a relatively late character used colloquially to mean 'look at' or 'glance,' as in 瞧一瞧 ('take a look').
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.'