Meaning & readings
sweep, brush
Origin
This character combines a hand radical on the left, showing the action of doing something with your hands, with the component 帚 on the right that serves as a sound hint for pronunciation. The 帚 component itself originally pictured a broom or brush made of twigs bundled together, which reinforces the sweeping meaning even though its main role here is phonetic. Together, the hand-action component and the broom-like sound hint create a character that means "to sweep" or "to brush" — the natural action performed with such a tool.
AI-generated (claude-haiku-4-5), not yet reviewed. Formation type (automated guess): Phono-semantic (meaning + sound hint).
Components
- 扌
- 帚
A sound hint component points at the character’s pronunciation, not its meaning — don’t read a meaning into it.
Common words
- 一掃 いっそう clean sweep; purging
- 清掃 せいそう cleaning; clean-up
- 掃く はく to sweep; to brush
- 掃海 そうかい sweeping the sea for mines; dragging for mines
- 掃除 そうじ cleaning; sweeping
- 掃討 そうとう cleaning up (enemy remnants); sweeping clean (of opponents)
- 大掃除 おおそうじ major cleanup; spring cleaning
- 掃除機 そうじき vacuum cleaner; vacuum
Reference
- Strokes
- 11
- Kangxi radical
- 64
- Grade
- Jōyō (secondary school)
- Frequency rank
- #1255 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 2
- Unicode
- U+06383