Meaning & readings
dig, delve, excavate
On’yomi クツ
Kun’yomi ほ.る
Nanori ぼり
Origin
The character 掘 combines a hand radical on the left, which marks actions done with the hands, with the component 屈 on the right, which provides a sound hint for how to pronounce the character. The hand radical shows this is about manual work, while 屈 guides you toward the クツ pronunciation. The idea of digging comes naturally from the hand-based action component, since digging is something you do with your hands or hand-held tools.
Components
- 扌
- 屈
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
- 11
- Kangxi radical
- 64
- Formation type
- Phono-semantic (meaning + sound hint)
- Grade
- Jōyō (secondary school)
- Frequency rank
- #1257 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 2
- Unicode
- U+06398