刻
kè HSK2

carve

刻 kè
quarter hour numeral
a unit of time equal to fifteen minutes; a short interval or specific moment

现在是三点一刻。

xiàn​zài shì sān​diǎn yī kè.

It is quarter past three.

carve verb
to engrave, cut, or incise characters or patterns into a surface

他在石碑上刻下了名字。

tā zài shí​bēi shàng kè xià le míng​zi.

He carved his name on the stone tablet.

oppressive adjective
harsh, cruel, or mean in treatment or character

这位老板对待员工的规定实在太刻了。

zhè wèi lǎo​bǎn duì​dài yuán​gōng de guī​dìng shí​zài tài kè le.

The boss's rules for his employees are really too harsh.

Frequency
Character
Written text
618th most common 336.0 per million
Movie subtitles
649th most common 210.2 per million appears in 65% of films
Word
Movie subtitles
17.9 per million appears in 8% of films
Written text
29.2 per million

Details
HSK 2.0
Level 3
HSK 3.0
Level 2
Strokes
8
Unicode
U+523B

Sources
Definitions
CC-CEDICT
Frequency data
MTSU Chinese text computingSUBTLEX-CHBCC Corpus (BLCU)