Meaning & readings
epidemic
On’yomi エキ、ヤク
Origin
This character combines the disease radical, which looks like a roof or shelter and classifies characters related to illness, with a sound hint component that suggests the pronunciation. The sound component doesn't contribute to the meaning, but it did help speakers of ancient Chinese remember roughly how to say the character. Together, the disease classifier and sound hint create a character meaning plague or epidemic—a widespread illness affecting many people at once.
Components
- 疒
- 殳
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
- 9
- Kangxi radical
- 104
- Formation type
- Phono-semantic (meaning + sound hint)
- Grade
- Jōyō (secondary school)
- Frequency rank
- #1661 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 1
- Unicode
- U+075AB