Meaning & readings
flower
On’yomi カ、ケ
Kun’yomi はな
Nanori わ
Origin
The character 花 combines a grass radical at the top, which signals that this character describes a plant, with the component 化 below it that serves as a sound hint for pronunciation. The grass radical is a natural classifier for anything that grows from the earth, and by pairing it with 化, the character came to specifically represent flowers—the most delicate and colorful parts of plants. Over time, this combination of "plant" plus a sound component solidified into the standard written form for the word "flower."
Components
- 艹
- 化
A sound hint component points at the character’s pronunciation, not its meaning — don’t read a meaning into it.
Common words
Reference
- Strokes
- 7
- Kangxi radical
- 140
- Formation type
- Phono-semantic (meaning + sound hint)
- Grade
- Grade 1 (Kyōiku)
- Frequency rank
- #578 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 4
- Unicode
- U+082B1