Meaning & readings
stipend, salary
Origin
The character 俸 combines a person radical on the left with the component 奉 on the right, which serves as a sound hint for the pronunciation. The character 奉 originally meant "to offer" or "to serve," and by extension came to represent offerings or payments given to someone. When paired with the person radical, the idea of an offering or payment naturally evolved into the meaning of a regular stipend or salary that a person receives, especially in historical Japanese contexts like payment to officials or retainers.
AI-generated (claude-haiku-4-5), not yet reviewed. Formation type (automated guess): Phono-semantic (meaning + sound hint).
Components
- 亻
- 奉
A sound hint component points at the character’s pronunciation, not its meaning — don’t read a meaning into it.
Common words
Reference
- Strokes
- 10
- Kangxi radical
- 9
- Grade
- Jōyō (secondary school)
- Frequency rank
- #1834 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 1
- Unicode
- U+04FF8