Meaning & readings
twist, ask, investigate, verify
Origin
The character combines the thread radical 糸 on the left, which points to the core meaning of something made from fibers, with a sound component 丩 on the right that hints at the pronunciation. The image of threads being twisted together led to the meaning "twist," and from there the character came to mean investigating or examining something thoroughly, as if you were unraveling and checking the threads carefully. The native Japanese reading ただ.す preserves this sense of setting something straight or correcting it through careful scrutiny.
Components
- 糸
- 丩
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
- 9
- Kangxi radical
- 120
- Formation type
- Phono-semantic (meaning + sound hint)
- Grade
- Jōyō (secondary school)
- Frequency rank
- #1820 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 1
- Unicode
- U+07CFE