Meaning & readings
double, twice, times, fold
On’yomi バイ
Nanori べ、ます
Origin
The character 倍 combines a person marker on the left with a sound component on the right. The right side, 咅, is a sound hint that tells you roughly how to pronounce the character, not what it means. The sense of "double" or "multiply" likely comes from the idea of doubling a person's effort or strength — one person becomes two people's worth of work. Over time, the meaning broadened to "double" or "times" in a mathematical sense.
Components
- 亻
- 咅
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 3 (Kyōiku)
- Frequency rank
- #714 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 2
- Unicode
- U+0500D