Meaning & readings

excellent, beautiful, good, pleasing, skilled

On’yomi カ
Nanori けい、よし

Origin

The character 佳 combines the "person" component on the left with a sound hint on the right that suggests how it's pronounced. The character originally developed to describe a person who embodies excellence or beauty—a skilled, pleasing individual. The right component doesn't add to the meaning but rather points toward the character's sound. Over time, the meaning expanded beyond just people to describe anything excellent, beautiful, or good.

佳 8 strokes

Components

  • 亻 radical left
  • 圭 sound hint right

A sound hint component points at the character’s pronunciation, not its meaning — don’t read a meaning into it.

Common words

  • 佳境 かきょう most interesting part (of a story); climax
  • 佳作 かさく fine (piece of) work; excellent work

Easily confused with

These look alike but are unrelated in meaning — check the stroke that differs.

Reference

Strokes
8
Kangxi radical
9
Formation type
Phono-semantic (meaning + sound hint)
Grade
Jōyō (secondary school)
Frequency rank
#1643 (newspapers)
Former JLPT
level 1
Unicode
U+04F73