Meaning & readings
pickling, soak, moisten, steep
On’yomi シ
Kun’yomi つ.ける、つ.かる、-づ.け、-づけ
Origin
The left side shows water (氵), which is the classifying radical that signals this character relates to liquids and soaking. The right side (責) provides a sound hint — it tells you roughly how to pronounce the character, not what it means. Together, water plus this sound indicator created a character that means to soak something in liquid, like vegetables in brine for pickling.
Components
- 氵
- 責
A sound hint component points at the character’s pronunciation, not its meaning — don’t read a meaning into it.
Common words
Easily confused with
These look alike but are unrelated in meaning — check the stroke that differs.
Reference
- Strokes
- 14
- Kangxi radical
- 85
- Formation type
- Phono-semantic (meaning + sound hint)
- Grade
- Jōyō (secondary school)
- Frequency rank
- #1818 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 1
- Unicode
- U+06F2C