Meaning & readings
sigh, lament, moan, grieve, sigh of admiration
Origin
This character combines the mouth radical on the left, which marks it as relating to sounds made with the mouth, with a right-side component that provides a sound hint for pronunciation. The overall shape depicts the physical act of sighing or lamenting—the mouth opening to release a deep sound of sorrow or emotion. Because sighing is a natural vocal expression of grief, regret, or sometimes awe, the character came to mean both lamenting and expressing admiration. The mouth radical makes sense here since sighing is fundamentally an audible breath, a sound that communicates inner feeling without words.
Components
This character is treated as a single, undivided shape (嘆).
Common words
Easily confused with
These look alike but are unrelated in meaning — check the stroke that differs.
Reference
- Strokes
- 13
- Kangxi radical
- 30
- Formation type
- Pictographic or simple
- Grade
- Jōyō (secondary school)
- Frequency rank
- #1584 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 1
- Unicode
- U+05606