Meaning & readings
war, battle, match
Origin
The right side of this character, 戈, is a picture of an ancient Chinese weapon—a halberd or spear—and serves as a meaning-hint that this character relates to combat. The left side, 単, provides a sound hint that guides pronunciation without adding to the meaning. Together they form a compound: the weapon radical signals this is about warfare and battle, while the sound component tells speakers how to pronounce the word. Over time, the character came to mean "war" or "battle" more broadly, and also extended to mean "match" or "contest" since these are forms of conflict.
Components
- 単
- 戈
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
- 13
- Kangxi radical
- 62
- Formation type
- Phono-semantic (meaning + sound hint)
- Grade
- Grade 4 (Kyōiku)
- Frequency rank
- #78 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 2
- Unicode
- U+06226