埋

A phono-semantic character.

土 (earth) — semantic component, indicates soil, ground, or covering with earth

里 (village; unit of distance, ri) — phonetic component, provides the sound (mae / mái)

The original sense is “to place something into the ground and cover it with earth.”

From this concrete action, several meanings developed:

- to bury (objects, bodies)

- to fill in or cover over (holes, spaces)

- to conceal or hide (abstract extension)

In funerary contexts, 埋 naturally came to mean “to inter the dead.”

埋葬 (매장) — burial; to bury the dead

埋沒 (매몰) — to bury; to submerge; to be lost or obscured

埋設 (매설) — to bury underground (pipes, cables, facilities)

埋藏 (매장) — to hide away; to store underground; mineral deposits

活埋 (활매) — to bury alive (historical / violent usage)

Grammatical and functional usage:

Verb (literal) - to bury; to inter, e.g. 屍體를 埋하다 (to bury a body)

Verb (extended) - to cover up; to fill in, e.g. 구덩이를 埋다 (to fill in a pit)

Figurative usage - to conceal; to suppress; to let something sink into obscurity, e.g. 才能이 埋沒되다 (talent is buried / goes unnoticed)

埋 is neutral in tone by itself, but compounds like 活埋 (to bury alive) carry strong historical and emotional weight.

In modern Chinese, 埋 is still widely used both literally and metaphorically (e.g. 埋沒人才 “to bury talent”).

In Korean, figurative uses such as 매몰되다 (“to be buried / overlooked”) are especially common in academic and journalistic writing.

Related characters:

葬 — to conduct a funeral; burial rites

瘞 — to bury (classical / literary, especially corpses)

掩 — to cover; to hide (not specifically with earth)

埋 emphasizes physical burial or covering with earth, while 葬 focuses more on funerary ritual.

Unlike 葬, 埋 does not inherently imply ceremony—it describes the act, not the ritual.