Meaning & readings
publish, carve, engrave
Origin
The character 刊 combines two parts: on the left, 干 provides a sound hint suggesting the pronunciation "kan," while on the right, 刂 is a knife or cutting radical that points to the meaning of carving or engraving. The knife component makes sense because publishing originally involved carving characters into wood or stone blocks before printing them. Over time, as printing technology evolved, 刊 came to mean "publish" more broadly, but it retained the visual reminder of that ancient carving process.
AI-generated (claude-haiku-4-5), not yet reviewed. Formation type (automated guess): Phono-semantic (meaning + sound hint).
Components
- 干
- 刂
A sound hint component points at the character’s pronunciation, not its meaning — don’t read a meaning into it.
Common words
- 刊行 かんこう publication; issue
- 季刊 きかん quarterly publication
- 休刊 きゅうかん suspension of publication
- 月刊 げっかん monthly publication; monthly issue
- 週刊 しゅうかん weekly publication
- 新刊 しんかん new book; new publication
- 創刊 そうかん foundation (of a newspaper, magazine, etc.); starting
- 朝刊 ちょうかん morning edition (of a daily newspaper); morning paper
Reference
- Strokes
- 5
- Kangxi radical
- 18
- Grade
- Grade 5 (Kyōiku)
- Frequency rank
- #855 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 2
- Unicode
- U+0520A