Meaning & readings
extinguish, blow out, turn off, neutralize, cancel
Origin
The character 消 combines water (the left component 氵, a simplified form of the water radical) with 肖, which serves as a sound hint for the pronunciation. Water that disappears or vanishes — like steam rising or liquid evaporating — gave the character its meanings of "extinguish" and "disappear." The right component 肖 doesn't contribute a meaning of its own; it's there primarily to suggest how the character should be pronounced. Over time, the meaning expanded from literal disappearance of water to more abstract senses like turning off a light or canceling something.
AI-generated (claude-haiku-4-5), not yet reviewed. Formation type (automated guess): Phono-semantic (meaning + sound hint).
Components
- 氵
- 肖
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
- 85
- Grade
- Grade 3 (Kyōiku)
- Frequency rank
- #345 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 2
- Unicode
- U+06D88