Meaning & readings
drown, sink, hide, fall into, disappear, die
Origin
The character combines water on the left, which points to something involving liquid, with a sound hint on the right that suggests its pronunciation. Together they form a character meaning to drown or sink—the water radical makes clear the connection to drowning or disappearing into water. The right component doesn't contribute a separate meaning but simply tells you roughly how the character sounds. This combination of a meaning-bearing element and a sound indicator is a common way Chinese characters were built.
AI-generated (claude-haiku-4-5), not yet reviewed. Formation type (automated guess): Phono-semantic (meaning + sound hint).
Components
- 氵
- 殳
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
- 85
- Grade
- Jōyō (secondary school)
- Frequency rank
- #1385 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 1
- Unicode
- U+06CA1