Meaning & readings
refined, ghost, fairy, energy, vitality, semen, excellence, purity, skill
Origin
The character 精 combines rice (米) on the left, which represents grain and refined food, with blue-green (青) on the right, which serves as a sound hint for how the character is pronounced. The idea of refining rice grain by grain — removing impurities to get something pure and concentrated — led to the broader meanings of "refined" and later "essential energy" or "vitality." Over time, the sense of something distilled or concentrated extended to mean spirit, ghost, or fairy — invisible essences thought to gather in refined or pure forms. The rice component grounds the character's root meaning in the concrete act of refinement.
Common words
Easily confused with
These look alike but are unrelated in meaning — check the stroke that differs.
Reference
- Strokes
- 14
- Kangxi radical
- 119
- Formation type
- Phono-semantic (meaning + sound hint)
- Grade
- Grade 5 (Kyōiku)
- Frequency rank
- #752 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 2
- Unicode
- U+07CBE