捏
niē HSK7

pick with fingers

捏 niē
mold verb
to shape or form something using the fingers

他很擅长捏泥人。

tā hěn shàn​cháng niē ní​rén.

He is very good at molding clay figurines.

fabricate verb
to invent or make up a story, report, or lie

这些话完全是他凭空捏出来的。

zhè​xiē huà wán​quán shì tā píng​kōng niē chu​lai de.

These words were entirely made up by him out of thin air.

grasp verb
to hold in one's hand, literally or figuratively

大家都为他捏了一把汗。

dà​jiā dōu wèi tā niē le yī bǎ hàn.

Everyone was nervous for him.

pinch verb
to hold between the thumb and fingers or to join things together by pressing

他用手指捏住了一只蚂蚁。

tā yòng shǒu​zhǐ niē zhù le yī zhī mǎ​yǐ.

He pinched an ant between his fingers.

Frequency
Character
Written text
2,472nd most common 19.8 per million
Movie subtitles
2,358th most common 10.9 per million appears in 6% of films
Word
Movie subtitles
10.1 per million appears in 4% of films
Written text
25.8 per million

Details
HSK 2.0
Level 6
HSK 3.0
Level 7
Strokes
10
Unicode
U+634F

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