Meaning & readings

cash, bad habit, humble prefix, gift, Shinto offerings of cloth, rope, cut paper

On’yomi ヘイ
Kun’yomi ぬさ
Nanori しで

Origin

The bottom component is a cloth radical, which makes sense because this character refers to physical offerings and textiles used in Shinto rituals. The top component is a sound hint that tells you roughly how to pronounce the character, but doesn't contribute a separate meaning. Over time, the character came to mean both the cloth offerings themselves and, by extension, money or gifts made with cloth or rope. The humble uses of the word developed from the idea of offering something simple or worn.

幣 15 strokes

Components

  • 敝 sound hint top
  • 巾 radical bottom

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
15
Kangxi radical
50
Formation type
Phono-semantic (meaning + sound hint)
Grade
Jōyō (secondary school)
Frequency rank
#1803 (newspapers)
Former JLPT
level 1
Unicode
U+05E63