Meaning & readings
steal, rob, pilfer
Origin
This character combines two ideas to express stealing. The bottom component is a dish or container, a common radical for things that can be taken or possessed. The top component suggests the idea of something being out of order or in the wrong place—a "next" or secondary position. Together, they picture the concept of taking something that isn't yours: removing an object from its proper place and putting it somewhere else, which is the essence of theft. Over time, the visual story of displacement and misappropriation came to mean steal or rob.
AI-generated (claude-haiku-4-5), not yet reviewed. Formation type (automated guess): Compound ideographic (combined meanings).
Common words
Reference
- Strokes
- 11
- Kangxi radical
- 108
- Grade
- Jōyō (secondary school)
- Frequency rank
- #1051 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 2
- Unicode
- U+076D7