Meaning & readings
skill, art, craft, ability, feat, performance, vocation, arts
Origin
The character 技 combines a hand component on the left, which refers to manual work or handling, with a sound hint on the right that suggests the pronunciation. The hand radical makes sense for "skill" and "craft" since these are things done with your hands — techniques, arts, and performances all involve manual ability or bodily control. The right component tells you roughly how to say the character rather than adding to its meaning. Over time, the character came to encompass all kinds of skill and ability, not just manual ones.
Components
- 扌
- 支
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
- 7
- Kangxi radical
- 64
- Formation type
- Phono-semantic (meaning + sound hint)
- Grade
- Grade 5 (Kyōiku)
- Frequency rank
- #434 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 2
- Unicode
- U+06280