Meaning & readings
cheerful, pleasant, agreeable, comfortable
On’yomi カイ
Kun’yomi こころよ.い
Nanori よし
Origin
The left component 忄 is a reduced form of the character for "heart" or "mind," which in Japanese characters often represents feelings and emotional states. The right component 夬 serves as a sound hint, telling you roughly how to pronounce the character. Together, the character's visual shape suggests a heart in a positive emotional state — the idea being that when your mind or heart feels this way, you experience the pleasant, comfortable, cheerful sensation that the character means.
Components
- 忄
- 夬
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
- 7
- Kangxi radical
- 61
- Formation type
- Phono-semantic (meaning + sound hint)
- Grade
- Grade 5 (Kyōiku)
- Frequency rank
- #1074 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 2
- Unicode
- U+05FEB