Meaning & readings
fall, drop, come down, village, hamlet
On’yomi ラク
Kun’yomi お.ちる、お.ち、お.とす
Nanori おち
Origin
This character shows a plant or grass part on top combined with a sound-hint component below. The lower part, 洛, roughly indicates the pronunciation "raku." The upper grass radical suggests the meaning involves plants or natural things, and when something grassy or leafy falls away from a plant, it drops down—capturing the sense of something falling or dropping. Over time, the meaning expanded to include more general falling motions, and also took on the sense of a village or settlement, possibly because the character came to be used in place names in Chinese.
Components
- 艹
- 洛
A sound hint component points at the character’s pronunciation, not its meaning — don’t read a meaning into it.
Common words
Reference
- Strokes
- 12
- Kangxi radical
- 140
- Formation type
- Phono-semantic (meaning + sound hint)
- Grade
- Grade 3 (Kyōiku)
- Frequency rank
- #420 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 2
- Unicode
- U+0843D