Meaning & readings
jammed in, shellfish, mediate, concern oneself with
Origin
This character most likely depicts a person viewed from the side, shown with the head at the top and the body below. The basic idea of a human figure led to the meaning "person" or "individual," which then extended to mean "to stand between" or "mediate"—the sense of one person positioned between others. The meanings "jammed in" and "to concern oneself with" developed from this core idea of insertion or involvement. Over time, the character also became associated with shellfish, possibly through sound similarity or historical borrowing in the development of written Chinese.
AI-generated (claude-haiku-4-5), not yet reviewed. Formation type (automated guess): Pictographic or simple.
Components
This character is treated as a single, undivided shape (介).
Common words
Reference
- Strokes
- 4
- Kangxi radical
- 9
- Grade
- Jōyō (secondary school)
- Frequency rank
- #617 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 2
- Unicode
- U+04ECB