Meaning & readings
attire, dress, pretend, disguise, profess
On’yomi ソウ、ショウ
Kun’yomi よそお.う、よそお.い
Origin
The character combines a clothing radical at the bottom, which groups it with other garment-related words, with a sound hint at the top that suggests its pronunciation. The bottom part, meaning "clothing" or "garment," directly connects to the core sense of dress and attire. Over time, the meanings expanded from literal clothing to wearing something as a disguise or pretending to have a quality you don't actually possess, since putting on clothes is a form of outer covering that can conceal what lies beneath.
AI-generated (claude-haiku-4-5), not yet reviewed. Formation type (automated guess): Phono-semantic (meaning + sound hint).
Common words
Reference
- Strokes
- 12
- Kangxi radical
- 145
- Grade
- Grade 6 (Kyōiku)
- Frequency rank
- #657 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 2
- Unicode
- U+088C5