翻来覆去
fān lái fù qù · HSK 7
to toss and turn
🛏️ flip come, flip go — tossing back and forth in bed
翻 means flip/turn, 来 means come, 覆 means again/over, 去 means go. The four characters trace the restless back-and-forth motion of someone who cannot fall asleep, flipping one way then the other, over and over.
翻 — 番 (turn/sequence) + 羽 (feathers)
A semantic-phonetic compound. 羽 (feathers) gives the meaning, evoking a bird flipping or fluttering its wings, while 番 supplies the sound. From this 'flip over' sense it extended to 'turn over,' 'overturn,' and later 'translate' — that is, turning words from one language into another.
来 — pictograph of a wheat plant with grain heads
来 originally depicted a stalk of wheat with drooping grain heads, and meant 'wheat' in oracle bone script. It was later borrowed phonetically to write the unrelated verb 'to come,' which became its dominant meaning. The original 'wheat' sense was taken over by 麥 (now 麦).
去 — 土 earth on top + 厶 (originally 凵, a vessel/container) below
Originally a pictograph showing a person (大) departing from an enclosed area or vessel, suggesting leaving or going away. Over time the top simplified to 土 and the bottom to 厶. The core meaning 'to go, to leave, to depart' has remained stable since ancient Chinese.