Meaning & readings
dissolve, melt
Origin
This character combines a heating vessel on the left (鬲, a tripod pot used in ancient times) with an insect on the right (虫) that serves as a sound hint for pronunciation. The vessel suggests the action of heating and warming, which naturally connects to the idea of melting or dissolving something solid into liquid. Over time, the character came to mean "dissolve" or "melt" more generally, keeping the image of that ancient cooking pot as a visual anchor for the concept.
AI-generated (claude-haiku-4-5), not yet reviewed. Formation type (automated guess): Phono-semantic (meaning + sound hint).
Components
- 鬲
- 虫
A sound hint component points at the character’s pronunciation, not its meaning — don’t read a meaning into it.
Common words
Reference
- Strokes
- 16
- Kangxi radical
- 142
- Grade
- Jōyō (secondary school)
- Frequency rank
- #481 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 1
- Unicode
- U+0878D