Meaning & readings
nucleus, core, kernel
On’yomi カク
Origin
The character 核 combines the wood radical 木 on the left, which classifies this as something related to trees or plant material, with the component 亥 on the right, which serves as a sound hint for the pronunciation. The character originally depicted the hard pit or stone at the center of a fruit—the kind you'd find in a peach or apricot from a tree. Over time, the meaning expanded from the physical seed pit to the more abstract sense of a core or central part of anything, including the nucleus of a cell or the kernel of an idea.
Components
- 木
- 亥
A sound hint component points at the character’s pronunciation, not its meaning — don’t read a meaning into it.
Common words
Reference
- Strokes
- 10
- Kangxi radical
- 75
- Formation type
- Phono-semantic (meaning + sound hint)
- Grade
- Jōyō (secondary school)
- Frequency rank
- #475 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 1
- Unicode
- U+06838