Meaning & readings
shake, wave, wag, swing
Origin
This character combines a hand radical on the left, which signals an action you do with your hands, with the component 辰 on the right, which serves as a sound hint—it doesn't contribute to the meaning but tells you the character should sound like "shin." The hand element makes sense for the meanings "shake" and "wave," since these are physical motions performed by moving your arm and hand back and forth. Over time, the character's meaning expanded to include related notions like swinging or waggling anything that moves in a similar back-and-forth way.
Components
- 扌
- 辰
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
- 10
- Kangxi radical
- 64
- Formation type
- Phono-semantic (meaning + sound hint)
- Grade
- Jōyō (secondary school)
- Frequency rank
- #614 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 1
- Unicode
- U+0632F