Meaning & readings
discard, throw away, abandon, resign, reject, sacrifice
Origin
This character combines the hand radical on the left (showing an action you do with your hands) with the sound component 舎 on the right, which hints at the pronunciation シャ. The hand radical paired with this sound element creates a character meaning "to discard or throw away" — the idea of physically casting something out by hand. The sound component doesn't tell you the meaning itself, but rather helps you know how to say the word. Over time, the character came to apply beyond just physical throwing to the broader sense of abandoning or sacrificing something.
AI-generated (claude-haiku-4-5), not yet reviewed. Formation type (automated guess): Phono-semantic (meaning + sound hint).
Components
- 扌
- 舎
A sound hint component points at the character’s pronunciation, not its meaning — don’t read a meaning into it.
Common words
- 取捨 しゅしゃ adoption or rejection; selection
- 捨てる すてる to throw away; to cast away
- 捨て子 すてご abandoned child; foundling
- 見捨てる みすてる to abandon; to fail
- 呼び捨て よびすて addressing (someone) without using a suffix such as "-san" or "-chan" (considered impolite)
- 四捨五入 ししゃごにゅう rounding (off; a number); rounding half away from zero
- 使い捨て つかいすて throwaway; disposable
- 切り捨て きりすて cutting a person down (without a second thought); sacrificing
Reference
- Strokes
- 11
- Kangxi radical
- 64
- Grade
- Grade 6 (Kyōiku)
- Frequency rank
- #1266 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 2
- Unicode
- U+06368