Meaning & readings
performance, act, play, render, stage
Origin
The character 演 combines water (氵) on the left with 寅 on the right, which serves as a sound hint for pronunciation. The water component suggests flowing or spreading outward, which pairs naturally with the idea of performance—an activity that extends outward to an audience. Over time, this combination came to represent the concept of putting on a show or staging a performance, where ideas and actions flow out from the performer to those watching. The 寅 component doesn't add meaning but simply indicates roughly how the character should be pronounced.
AI-generated (claude-haiku-4-5), not yet reviewed. Formation type (automated guess): Phono-semantic (meaning + sound hint).
Components
- 氵
- 寅
A sound hint component points at the character’s pronunciation, not its meaning — don’t read a meaning into it.
Common words
Reference
- Strokes
- 14
- Kangxi radical
- 85
- Grade
- Grade 5 (Kyōiku)
- Frequency rank
- #267 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 2
- Unicode
- U+06F14