Meaning & readings
individual, counter for articles
On’yomi コ、カ
Origin
The character 個 combines a person radical on the left with the component 固 on the right, which serves as a sound hint for how to pronounce the character. The left part (人, person) indicates this character relates to people or individual things. Over time, this character came to mean "individual" or "one item," and it developed into a counter word used when counting discrete objects in Japanese. The right component 固 doesn't contribute to the meaning but rather guided speakers on pronunciation.
Components
- 亻
- 固
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
- Formation type
- Phono-semantic (meaning + sound hint)
- Grade
- Grade 5 (Kyōiku)
- Frequency rank
- #451 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 2
- Unicode
- U+0500B