Meaning & readings
feelings, emotion, passion, sympathy, circumstances, facts
Origin
This character combines the heart radical on the left, which signals that the word deals with emotions or feelings, with the character for "blue" or "green" on the right, which provides a sound hint for pronunciation. The heart radical alone (心) appears in many emotion-related characters, so here it anchors the meaning to the realm of feelings and circumstances. The right component doesn't mean "blue" in this context — it's just there to tell you roughly how to pronounce the word. Together, the visual pairing of "heart plus sound hint" creates a character that captures the idea of feelings and emotional responses.
Components
- 忄
- 青
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
- 11
- Kangxi radical
- 61
- Formation type
- Phono-semantic (meaning + sound hint)
- Grade
- Grade 5 (Kyōiku)
- Frequency rank
- #235 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 2
- Unicode
- U+060C5