Meaning & readings
long time, old story
On’yomi キュウ、ク
Kun’yomi ひさ.しい
Nanori きゅ、わ、なが、ひさ、ひさし
Origin
This character appears to be a picture of a person bent or crouching down, shown by the vertical line for the body and the curved strokes suggesting bent legs or a stooped posture. The image of someone in a hunched position came to represent the idea of "long" or "enduring" — perhaps because a person forced to stay in an uncomfortable, cramped position for a long time would naturally hunch over like this. Over time, the meaning shifted to capture the broader sense of extended duration or something that has lasted a very long time.
Components
This character is treated as a single, undivided shape (久).
Common words
Reference
- Strokes
- 3
- Kangxi radical
- 4
- Formation type
- Pictographic or simple
- Grade
- Grade 5 (Kyōiku)
- Frequency rank
- #688 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 2
- Unicode
- U+04E45