Meaning & readings
confront, resist, defy, oppose
Origin
The character 抗 combines the hand radical on the left, which signals that this character describes an action you do with your hands or body, with the component 亢 on the right, which serves as a sound hint for the pronunciation. The hand radical paired with a sound component is a common pattern in kanji. The meaning of "resist" or "oppose" likely developed from the physical sense of pushing back against something with your hands or body, which is a natural way to express the idea of defying or confronting something. Over time, the character expanded to include the more abstract sense of resisting or opposing in general.
Components
- 扌
- 亢
A sound hint component points at the character’s pronunciation, not its meaning — don’t read a meaning into it.
Common words
Reference
- Strokes
- 7
- Kangxi radical
- 64
- Formation type
- Phono-semantic (meaning + sound hint)
- Grade
- Jōyō (secondary school)
- Frequency rank
- #666 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 1
- Unicode
- U+06297