Meaning & readings
set free, release, fire, shoot, emit, banish, liberate
On’yomi ホウ
Kun’yomi はな.す、-っぱな.し、はな.つ、はな.れる、こ.く、ほう.る
Nanori はなれ
Origin
The character 放 combines two parts to express the idea of releasing or letting go. On the left, 方 serves as a sound hint, suggesting roughly how the character should be pronounced (ホウ). On the right, 攵 is a small action radical meaning "to strike" or "to act," which points toward the physical sense of throwing or casting something away. Together, the combination suggests an active motion of releasing—setting something free or shooting it out. This pairing of a sound component with an action component is typical of how many Japanese kanji were built from Chinese characters.
Components
- 方
- 攵
A sound hint component points at the character’s pronunciation, not its meaning — don’t read a meaning into it.
Common words
Reference
- Strokes
- 8
- Kangxi radical
- 66
- Formation type
- Phono-semantic (meaning + sound hint)
- Grade
- Grade 3 (Kyōiku)
- Frequency rank
- #288 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 2
- Unicode
- U+0653E