Meaning & readings
fare, fee, hire, rent, wages, charge
On’yomi チン
Nanori すけ
Origin
This character combines a sound hint with a meaning classifier. The bottom component 貝 originally depicted a shell and came to represent money or valuables in Chinese writing. The top component 任 serves as a sound hint, suggesting roughly how the character should be pronounced. Together, the character means the price you pay for something—whether it's rent for a house, a fare for travel, or wages for work. By pairing the money classifier with the sound hint, the character efficiently conveys both the concept of payment and how to say it aloud.
Common words
Easily confused with
These look alike but are unrelated in meaning — check the stroke that differs.
Reference
- Strokes
- 13
- Kangxi radical
- 154
- Formation type
- Phono-semantic (meaning + sound hint)
- Grade
- Grade 6 (Kyōiku)
- Frequency rank
- #961 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 2
- Unicode
- U+08CC3