Meaning & readings
wish, sense, idea, thought, feeling, desire, attention
On’yomi ネン
Origin
The character 念 combines a heart radical at the bottom — the source of all feeling and thought — with the sound hint 今 (meaning "now") at the top. The 今 component doesn't contribute to the meaning; it's mainly a clue that the character is pronounced something like ネン. Together, the shape suggests the idea of the heart dwelling on something in the present moment — a wish, thought, or feeling held in the mind. This is why 念 came to mean desire, idea, and the act of wishing or thinking.
AI-generated (claude-haiku-4-5), not yet reviewed. Formation type (automated guess): Phono-semantic (meaning + sound hint).
Common words
Reference
- Strokes
- 8
- Kangxi radical
- 61
- Grade
- Grade 4 (Kyōiku)
- Frequency rank
- #390 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 2
- Unicode
- U+05FF5