卖
mài
In real, traceable use. Part of the curated seed collection; community review is coming.
Traditional: 賣
To sell: to let someone have goods in return for money. Say it with the falling fourth tone; with the dipping third tone, mǎi, it turns into its opposite, 买 'to buy'. The characters look alike too, but 卖 has an extra 十 on top. At a market stall, 怎么卖？ asks what something costs.
Bán: trao hàng cho người khác để lấy tiền. Đọc thanh 4 (mài); đọc thanh 3 (mǎi) thì thành 买 “mua”, nghĩa ngược lại. Hai chữ cũng trông gần giống nhau, nhưng 卖 có thêm chữ 十 ở trên. Ra chợ hỏi giá thì nói 怎么卖？ (bán thế nào?).
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 ↗ · 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 “卖” mean?
To sell: to let someone have goods in return for money. Say it with the falling fourth tone; with the dipping third tone, mǎi, it turns into its opposite, 买 'to buy'. The characters look alike too, but 卖 has an extra 十 on top. At a market stall, 怎么卖？ asks what something costs.
Is “卖” formal or informal?
卖 is generally neutral.