Meaning & readings
blessing, fortune, luck, wealth
Origin
The character 福 combines a religious or shrine symbol on the left (礻, which classifies this as relating to blessings or worship) with a sound hint on the right (畐, which suggests the pronunciation "fuku"). The left component points to the sense of divine favor or good fortune that comes from religious observance or the gods' blessing, while the right component is there mainly to signal how the word should be pronounced in Chinese and Japanese. Together they create a character that literally means "blessing" or "fortune"—the kind of good luck people pray for at shrines.
Components
- 礻
- 畐
A sound hint component points at the character’s pronunciation, not its meaning — don’t read a meaning into it.
Common words
- 幸福 こうふく happiness; well-being
- 至福 しふく beatitude; supreme bliss
- 祝福 しゅくふく celebration (of a joyous occasion); blessing
- 福音 ふくいん good news; glad tidings
- 福祉 ふくし welfare; well-being
- 冥福 めいふく happiness in the next world; heavenly bliss
- 裕福 ゆうふく wealthy; rich
- 福助 ふくすけ large-headed dwarf statue, bringer of good luck
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
- Grade 3 (Kyōiku)
- Frequency rank
- #467 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 2
- Unicode
- U+0798F