Meaning & readings
volume, product (x*y), acreage, contents, pile up, stack, load, amass
Origin
This character combines two parts. The left side, 禾, shows grain or crops and signals that the character relates to agriculture or harvesting. The right side, 責, serves as a sound hint telling you roughly how to pronounce the character (セキ), but does not itself describe the meaning. Over time, the concept of "piling up grain" or "accumulating a harvest" led to the broader meanings of stacking, piling up, and then the abstract sense of "product" — what you get when you multiply quantities together, similar to how grain accumulates volume through stacking.
Components
- 禾
- 責
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
- 16
- Kangxi radical
- 115
- Formation type
- Phono-semantic (meaning + sound hint)
- Grade
- Grade 4 (Kyōiku)
- Frequency rank
- #541 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 2
- Unicode
- U+07A4D