Meaning & readings
freight, goods, property
On’yomi カ
Kun’yomi たから
Origin
This character combines a shell radical at the bottom with a sound hint at the top. The shell component, which represents 貝, historically symbolized valuable items and currency in ancient China — shells were actually used as money before metal coins. The top component 化 serves as a sound hint, telling you roughly how to pronounce the character rather than adding to its meaning. Together, the character depicts something precious and tradable, which is why it came to mean goods, freight, and property.
Common words
Easily confused with
These look alike but are unrelated in meaning — check the stroke that differs.
Reference
- Strokes
- 11
- Kangxi radical
- 154
- Formation type
- Phono-semantic (meaning + sound hint)
- Grade
- Grade 4 (Kyōiku)
- Frequency rank
- #822 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 2
- Unicode
- U+08CA8