Meaning & readings
bond, loan, debt
Origin
The character 債 combines a person radical on the left, which marks this as relating to human affairs or relationships, with the component 責 on the right that serves as a sound hint—telling you roughly how to pronounce the character rather than adding to its meaning. The core idea of debt or obligation emerges from the concept of a person bound by a responsibility or owing something to another. Over time, this expanded to include loans and financial bonds, all situations where one person is obligated to another. The structure makes sense: a person plus a sound indicator creates a character for interpersonal financial obligations.
Components
- 亻
- 責
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
- 13
- Kangxi radical
- 9
- Formation type
- Phono-semantic (meaning + sound hint)
- Grade
- Jōyō (secondary school)
- Frequency rank
- #728 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 1
- Unicode
- U+050B5