Meaning & readings
becoming, resemble, counterfeit, imitate, suitable
On’yomi ジ
Kun’yomi に.る、ひ.る
Nanori にた
Origin
This character combines a person radical on the left with a sound-hint component on the right. The person radical signals that this character relates to human behavior or qualities. The right component indicates roughly how the character sounds in Chinese. Together, the combination came to mean "to resemble" or "to imitate"—essentially describing how one person or thing can look like or copy another. The sense of "becoming" or "being suitable" developed from this core idea of matching or fitting the form of something else.
Components
- 亻
- 以
A sound hint component points at the character’s pronunciation, not its meaning — don’t read a meaning into it.
Common words
Reference
- Strokes
- 7
- Kangxi radical
- 9
- Formation type
- Phono-semantic (meaning + sound hint)
- Grade
- Grade 5 (Kyōiku)
- Frequency rank
- #923 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 2
- Unicode
- U+04F3C