Meaning & readings
vice-, assistant, aide, duplicate, copy
Origin
The character 副 combines a sound hint on the left with a knife radical on the right. The left component 畐 doesn't contribute to the meaning but signals roughly how the character should sound. The knife radical 刂 on the right suggests the idea of cutting or dividing something into parts. Together, these components convey the sense of something that is cut away or separated—a secondary or auxiliary thing, like an assistant or duplicate that exists alongside something main. This visual logic captures how the character came to mean "vice-" or "assistant."
Components
- 畐
- 刂
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
- 11
- Kangxi radical
- 18
- Formation type
- Phono-semantic (meaning + sound hint)
- Grade
- Grade 4 (Kyōiku)
- Frequency rank
- #360 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 2
- Unicode
- U+0526F