Meaning & readings
clothing, admit, obey, discharge
On’yomi フク
Nanori はっ、はつ、はら
Origin
The left side, 月, originally meant "flesh" or "body" and here indicates the general category of things related to the body. The right component is a sound hint that tells you roughly how to pronounce the character — it doesn't contribute a meaning of its own. When you put these together, a character about the body's covering or adornment naturally came to mean "clothing." Over time, the meaning extended to "wear" or "dress," and then further to "obey" or "submit to" — perhaps because wearing clothes means accepting them on your body, similar to how obeying means accepting rules.
Components
- 月
- 𠬝
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
- 74
- Formation type
- Phono-semantic (meaning + sound hint)
- Grade
- Grade 3 (Kyōiku)
- Frequency rank
- #873 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 3
- Unicode
- U+0670D