Meaning & readings
throw, discard, abandon, launch into, join, invest in, hurl, give up, sell at a loss
Origin
The character 投 combines the hand radical on the left, which signals an action performed by the hand, with a sound component on the right that hints at pronunciation. The hand component points toward the basic meaning of a manual action, while the right side tells you roughly how to say the word. When you put a hand to work throwing something — whether that's an object through the air or yourself into a task — you get the sense of "throw" or "cast." This same physical action of propelling something away naturally extended to meanings like "abandon," "launch," or "invest," since investing your money is like throwing it toward a goal.
Components
- 扌
- 殳
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 3 (Kyōiku)
- Frequency rank
- #236 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 2
- Unicode
- U+06295