Meaning & readings
idea, thought, conception, think
On’yomi ソウ、ソ
Kun’yomi おも.う
Origin
The character combines "heart" (心) at the bottom, which is the classifying radical for mental and emotional concepts, with a sound hint component (相) at the top that tells you roughly how to pronounce it. Since thinking and ideas happen in the heart-mind, the pairing makes sense: the heart radical grounds the character in the realm of thought and emotion, while the top component signals the pronunciation. Together they create a character that means "to think" or "an idea" — capturing how Japanese speakers conceptualized the mind's activity as something of the heart.
Common words
Reference
- Strokes
- 13
- Kangxi radical
- 61
- Formation type
- Phono-semantic (meaning + sound hint)
- Grade
- Grade 3 (Kyōiku)
- Frequency rank
- #381 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 2
- Unicode
- U+060F3