Meaning & readings
chair
On’yomi イ
Origin
This character combines wood (the left component) with a sound hint on the right. The character for wood, a basic classifier, indicates that a chair is made of wood—a natural material shaped into furniture. The right component provides a pronunciation guide rather than additional meaning. Together, the wooden material classifier paired with this phonetic element creates the character for chair, reflecting how chairs are typically wooden objects in the context where this character developed.
Common words
Easily confused with
These look alike but are unrelated in meaning — check the stroke that differs.
Reference
- Strokes
- 12
- Kangxi radical
- 75
- Formation type
- Compound ideographic (combined meanings)
- Grade
- Jōyō (secondary school)
- Frequency rank
- #2245 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- —
- Unicode
- U+06905