Meaning & readings
abet, help, save
On’yomi エン
Origin
The left component shows a hand, indicating this character is about manual action or support. The right component is a sound hint that tells you roughly how to pronounce the character (えん), without adding to the meaning itself. Together, the hand radical combined with this sound element creates a character meaning "to help" or "to support" — the idea of one person reaching out a hand to aid another.
Components
- 扌
- 爰
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
- 12
- Kangxi radical
- 64
- Formation type
- Phono-semantic (meaning + sound hint)
- Grade
- Jōyō (secondary school)
- Frequency rank
- #312 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 1
- Unicode
- U+063F4