打电话
dǎ diàn huà
In real, traceable use. Part of the curated seed collection; community review is coming.
Traditional: 打電話
To ring someone up, to call them on the phone. The person you call comes first, with 给: 给老师打电话 'to call the teacher'. 打 'to hit' is a general-purpose verb here; 电话 is the phone or the call, and 接电话 (jiē diànhuà) is 'to answer the phone'.
Gọi điện thoại cho ai đó. Người được gọi đứng trước, đi với 给: 给老师打电话 (gọi điện cho thầy giáo), khác tiếng Việt, nơi “cho ai” đứng sau. 打 vốn là “đánh”, 电话 là điện thoại; nghe máy là 接电话 (jiē diànhuà).
VerbRegister: neutral
Examples
Editorial example (illustrative, not a corpus attestation) — awaiting a native-speaker check
Sources & notes
Hán-Việt bridge batch 064 (2026-11-14). Headword, Traditional form and pinyin checked against CC-CEDICT (CC BY-SA 4.0) source ↗ · Hán-Việt reading: Unihan kVietnamese source ↗ ; en.wiktionary Vietnamese entries via kaikki.org extract, snapshot 2026-07-31 (CC BY-SA 4.0): Hán-Việt reading 电/電 = điện · No Vietnamese entry is linked as its twin; the Hán-Việt reading is given character by character. Definition, literal gloss and example sentence are original; the example has not had a native-speaker check yet.
Common questions
What does “打电话” mean?
To ring someone up, to call them on the phone. The person you call comes first, with 给: 给老师打电话 'to call the teacher'. 打 'to hit' is a general-purpose verb here; 电话 is the phone or the call, and 接电话 (jiē diànhuà) is 'to answer the phone'. Literally: hit electric speech
Is “打电话” formal or informal?
打电话 is generally neutral.