Meaning & readings
lose, error, fault, disadvantage, loss
On’yomi シツ
Kun’yomi うしな.う、う.せる
Origin
The character 失 combines two visual ideas: a slash stroke and the component 夫, which represents a man or person. The original picture showed something falling or dropping away from a person — the slash suggests motion downward or loss. Over time, this image of something slipping away from someone came to mean losing or missing something, and by extension, any kind of error or fault. The simplified modern form keeps just the essential strokes that suggest this sense of something going wrong or disappearing.
Components
- 丿
- 夫
Common words
Easily confused with
These look alike but are unrelated in meaning — check the stroke that differs.
Reference
- Strokes
- 5
- Kangxi radical
- 37
- Formation type
- Compound ideographic (combined meanings)
- Grade
- Grade 4 (Kyōiku)
- Frequency rank
- #447 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 2
- Unicode
- U+05931