Meaning & readings
amass, raise, hoard, store
Origin
This character combines a grass radical at the top with the component 畜 below, which sounds like "chiku" and serves as a sound hint for pronunciation. The grass radical suggests the character relates to plants or growing things. The underlying meaning developed from the idea of keeping or maintaining plants and animals together—essentially gathering and preserving living things. Over time, the meaning broadened from this agricultural sense to mean storing or hoarding things more generally. The grass element likely emphasizes the original connection to raising livestock and cultivating plants, activities central to accumulating resources in early societies.
Components
- 艹
- 畜
A sound hint component points at the character’s pronunciation, not its meaning — don’t read a meaning into it.
Common words
Reference
- Strokes
- 13
- Kangxi radical
- 140
- Formation type
- Phono-semantic (meaning + sound hint)
- Grade
- Jōyō (secondary school)
- Frequency rank
- #1260 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 1
- Unicode
- U+084C4