Meaning & readings
go-between, relationship
Origin
The character 仲 combines a person radical on the left, which indicates this is a word about people or relationships, with the character 中 on the right that serves as a sound hint, suggesting the pronunciation. The 中 component originally meant "middle" or "center," and over time the character came to represent someone who stands in the middle between two other people—a go-between or mediator. The meaning expanded to encompass relationships and connections more broadly, since a mediator helps establish or maintain relationships between others.
Components
- 亻
- 中
A sound hint component points at the character’s pronunciation, not its meaning — don’t read a meaning into it.
Common words
Easily confused with
These look alike but are unrelated in meaning — check the stroke that differs.
Reference
- Strokes
- 6
- Kangxi radical
- 9
- Formation type
- Phono-semantic (meaning + sound hint)
- Grade
- Grade 4 (Kyōiku)
- Frequency rank
- #919 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 2
- Unicode
- U+04EF2