该
gāi HSK2

should

该 (該) gāi
should verb
should or ought to

既然做错了事，你就该去向他道歉。

jì​rán zuò​cuò le shì, nǐ jiù gāi qù xiàng tā dào​qiàn.

Since you did something wrong, you should go and apologize to him.

that pronoun
the aforementioned or above-mentioned

该生表现十分优秀。

gāi shēng biǎo​xiàn shí​fēn yōu​xiù.

The student's performance is excellent.

probably verb
indicating high probability or that something must be the case

他现在该到家了。

tā xiàn​zài gāi dào jiā le.

He should be home by now.

one's turn verb
to be someone's turn to do something

该我上场了。

gāi wǒ shàng​chǎng le.

It's my turn to go on stage.

owe verb
to be in debt to someone

我还该你十块钱。

wǒ huán gāi nǐ shí kuài qián.

I still owe you ten yuan.

Frequency
Character
Written text
319th most common 703.1 per million
Movie subtitles
95th most common 1721.6 per million appears in 100% of films
Word
Movie subtitles
1018.6 per million appears in 94% of films
Written text
830.7 per million

Details
HSK 2.0
Level 3
HSK 3.0
Level 2
Traditional
該
Strokes
8
Unicode
U+8BE5

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