Meaning & readings
negative, non-, bad, ugly, clumsy
On’yomi フ、ブ
Origin
This character most likely started as a pictograph of a flying bird with wings spread, shown upside down or inverted. The inversion or reversal of the bird's natural position came to represent the idea of something being opposite, wrong, or negated — the opposite of how things should be. Over time, the shape simplified into the four strokes we see today, but the core meaning of negation and opposition stuck around, making it the standard character used to express "not" and related negative ideas in Japanese and Chinese.
AI-generated (claude-haiku-4-5), not yet reviewed. Formation type (automated guess): Compound ideographic (combined meanings).
Components
- 一
- 丿
- 丨
Common words
Reference
- Strokes
- 4
- Kangxi radical
- 1
- Grade
- Grade 4 (Kyōiku)
- Frequency rank
- #101 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 3
- Unicode
- U+04E0D