Meaning & readings
decline, wane, weaken
On’yomi スイ
Kun’yomi おとろ.える
Origin
This character appears to show a person (the left side) with something collapsing or falling away (the right side). The idea is that when a person's strength or vitality falls away or crumbles, they experience decline and weakness. The visual structure captures the sense of something solid becoming unstable and deteriorating, which matches the meaning of waning or weakening over time.
Components
This character is treated as a single, undivided shape (衰).
Common words
Reference
- Strokes
- 10
- Kangxi radical
- 145
- Formation type
- Pictographic or simple
- Grade
- Jōyō (secondary school)
- Frequency rank
- #1432 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 1
- Unicode
- U+08870