Meaning & readings
Zen, silent meditation
On’yomi ゼン、セン
Kun’yomi しずか、ゆず.る
Origin
The character combines a religious or spiritual element on the left (the altar or shrine radical, showing this relates to worship or meditation) with a sound hint on the right that tells you roughly how to pronounce it. The left part gives the semantic field—this is about spiritual practice—while the right part sounds similar to the character's pronunciation. Over time, 禅 came to represent the Buddhist practice of quiet, focused meditation known as Zen.
Components
- 礻
- 単
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
- 13
- Kangxi radical
- 113
- Formation type
- Phono-semantic (meaning + sound hint)
- Grade
- Jōyō (secondary school)
- Frequency rank
- #1902 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 1
- Unicode
- U+07985