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.
Components
- 亻
- 圭
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
- 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