Meaning & readings
symptoms, illness
Origin
The character 症 combines two parts to represent illness and its visible signs. The left component 疒, which looks like a bed or reclining figure, is a classifier specifically used for characters related to sickness and disease — it immediately signals that this character concerns health problems. The right component 正 serves as a sound hint, telling you roughly how to pronounce the character (ショウ), without contributing to the meaning itself. Together, the "illness classifier" paired with this sound indicator creates a character that means symptoms or illness — the outward manifestations of disease that appear in a sick person.
Components
- 疒
- 正
A sound hint component points at the character’s pronunciation, not its meaning — don’t read a meaning into it.
Common words
- 炎症 えんしょう inflammation; irritation
- 重症 じゅうしょう serious illness
- 症候 しょうこう symptom
- 症状 しょうじょう symptoms; condition (of a patient)
- 症例 しょうれい case
- 発症 はっしょう outbreak of an illness; onset of a condition
- 花粉症 かふんしょう hay fever; pollinosis (allergy to pollen)
- 既往症 きおうしょう illness that one had in the past; previous illness
Reference
- Strokes
- 10
- Kangxi radical
- 104
- Formation type
- Phono-semantic (meaning + sound hint)
- Grade
- Jōyō (secondary school)
- Frequency rank
- #1111 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 1
- Unicode
- U+075C7