Meaning & readings
savings, store, lay in, keep, wear mustache
Origin
This character combines the radical for money or valuables—shown on the left as a picture of a shell, which was used as currency in ancient times—with a sound component on the right that tells you roughly how to pronounce it. Together they create the idea of holding onto money or goods over time, which is what "storing" or "savings" means. The shell component makes sense because storing up valuables was a natural concern for people dealing with precious items, and the sound hint helps readers know to say it as "cho."
Components
- 貝
- 宁
A sound hint component points at the character’s pronunciation, not its meaning — don’t read a meaning into it.
Common words
Easily confused with
These look alike but are unrelated in meaning — check the stroke that differs.
Reference
- Strokes
- 12
- Kangxi radical
- 154
- Formation type
- Phono-semantic (meaning + sound hint)
- Grade
- Grade 5 (Kyōiku)
- Frequency rank
- #1100 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 2
- Unicode
- U+08CAF