Meaning & readings
bad, vice, rascal, evil, wrong
On’yomi アク、オ
Kun’yomi わる.い、わる-、あ.し、にく.い、-にく.い、ああ、いずくに、いずくんぞ、にく.む
Origin
The character combines the heart or mind component at the bottom with a sound-hint component at the top. The heart radical makes sense for capturing an emotional or moral concept, since many ideas about character and disposition were thought to originate from the heart in East Asian philosophy. The top component signals roughly how the character should be pronounced, following the common pattern in kanji where one part suggests meaning and another suggests sound. Together, these pieces create a character for moral or emotional badness.
Common words
Easily confused with
These look alike but are unrelated in meaning — check the stroke that differs.
Reference
- Strokes
- 11
- Kangxi radical
- 61
- Formation type
- Phono-semantic (meaning + sound hint)
- Grade
- Grade 3 (Kyōiku)
- Frequency rank
- #530 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 3
- Unicode
- U+060AA