Meaning & readings
dreadful, be frightened, fearful
On’yomi フ、ホ
Kun’yomi こわ.い、こわ.がる、お.じる、おそ.れる
Origin
This character combines a heart component on the left, which signals that the character relates to emotions or mental states, with the component for cloth on the right. The cloth component serves as a sound hint, telling you roughly how to pronounce the character, rather than contributing to its meaning. Together, they create a character meaning fear or dread — capturing the idea of a frightened heart or an emotional state of being afraid.
Components
- 忄
- 布
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
- 8
- Kangxi radical
- 61
- Formation type
- Phono-semantic (meaning + sound hint)
- Grade
- Jōyō (secondary school)
- Frequency rank
- #1325 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 2
- Unicode
- U+06016