Meaning & readings
ill, sick
On’yomi ビョウ、ヘイ
Kun’yomi や.む、-や.み、やまい
Origin
The character 病 combines a radical meaning sickness or ailment (the roof-like shape on the left) with a sound hint component on the right. The left part, which looks like a bed or roof, comes from pictures of a person resting or lying down due to illness. The right component 丙 doesn't add meaning but signals roughly how the character should be pronounced in Chinese and Japanese. Together, the shape evolved to represent the concept of being sick or diseased, with the sound hint helping speakers remember the correct reading.
Components
- 疒
- 丙
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
- 10
- Kangxi radical
- 104
- Formation type
- Phono-semantic (meaning + sound hint)
- Grade
- Grade 3 (Kyōiku)
- Frequency rank
- #384 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 3
- Unicode
- U+075C5