Meaning & readings
strike, hit, knock, pound, dozen
Origin
The character 打 combines a hand radical on the left, which indicates the general category of hand actions, with the component 丁 on the right, which serves as a sound hint for the pronunciation. The hand radical shows that this character relates to something you do with your hand, while 丁 doesn't contribute a separate meaning—it just suggests roughly how the character should sound. Together they create a character meaning to strike or hit, actions performed with the hand. This is a common pattern in Japanese and Chinese characters, where a meaning-related part teams up with a sound guide to create new words.
Components
- 扌
- 丁
A sound hint component points at the character’s pronunciation, not its meaning — don’t read a meaning into it.
Common words
Reference
- Strokes
- 5
- Kangxi radical
- 64
- Formation type
- Phono-semantic (meaning + sound hint)
- Grade
- Grade 3 (Kyōiku)
- Frequency rank
- #239 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 2
- Unicode
- U+06253