Meaning & readings
poem, poetry
On’yomi シ
Kun’yomi うた
Origin
The character 詩 combines the radical 言, which means "words" or "language," with the component 寺 on the right side. The 寺 part acts as a sound hint, telling you roughly how to pronounce the character (something like "shi"), rather than contributing a meaning. Since poetry is fundamentally about carefully chosen words arranged in meaningful ways, pairing the "words" radical with a sound indicator created a character that represents the art of composing poems. The resulting shape 詩 thus pictures the idea of language given special form and beauty.
AI-generated (claude-haiku-4-5), not yet reviewed. Formation type (automated guess): Phono-semantic (meaning + sound hint).
Common words
- 漢詩 かんし Chinese poem; Chinese poetry
- 詩集 ししゅう poetry anthology; collection of poems
- 詩情 しじょう poetic sentiment
- 詩人 しじん poet
- 詩歌 しいか Japanese and Chinese poetry
- 叙事詩 じょじし epic (poem); epic poetry
- 近代詩 きんだいし modern poetry; modern-style poetry
- 風物詩 ふうぶつし feature of the season; something characteristic of a particular season
Reference
- Strokes
- 13
- Kangxi radical
- 149
- Grade
- Grade 3 (Kyōiku)
- Frequency rank
- #1196 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 1
- Unicode
- U+08A69