Meaning & readings
dance, flit, circle, wheel
Origin
The bottom part, 舛, shows two feet stepping in opposite directions — a picture of the footwork in dancing. The top component is a sound hint that tells you roughly how to pronounce the character, not what it means. Together, these parts combine to create a character that captures both the meaning of dance through the image of moving feet and the sound through the phonetic component. Over time, the character came to mean not just dance but also related circular or wheeling motions, perhaps because dancing often involves turning and moving in patterns.
AI-generated (claude-haiku-4-5), not yet reviewed. Formation type (automated guess): Phono-semantic (meaning + sound hint).
Components
- 丿+2+一+3+3+3+3+2
- 舛
A sound hint component points at the character’s pronunciation, not its meaning — don’t read a meaning into it.
Common words
Reference
- Strokes
- 15
- Kangxi radical
- 136
- Grade
- Jōyō (secondary school)
- Frequency rank
- #655 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 2
- Unicode
- U+0821E