Meaning & readings
article, clause, counter for articles, clauses, paragraphs, etc., twig, item, stripe, streak
On’yomi ジョウ、チョウ、デキ
Kun’yomi えだ、すじ
Origin
This character combines wood (木) with a sound hint on top (夂) to suggest a thin piece of wood. The wood radical points you toward the physical object, while the top component indicates roughly how to pronounce the character. Since twigs are thin, elongated pieces of wood with natural divisions, the character came to represent not just twigs but also stripe-like patterns and items arranged in lines or sequences — which led to meanings like article and clause, since these divide text into countable sections much like a twig's segments.
Components
- 夂
- 木
A sound hint component points at the character’s pronunciation, not its meaning — don’t read a meaning into it.
Common words
Reference
- Strokes
- 7
- Kangxi radical
- 75
- Formation type
- Phono-semantic (meaning + sound hint)
- Grade
- Grade 5 (Kyōiku)
- Frequency rank
- #363 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 2
- Unicode
- U+06761