Meaning & readings
ugly, unclean, shame, bad looking
On’yomi シュウ
Kun’yomi みにく.い、しこ
Origin
The character 醜 combines two components to express something fundamentally unpleasant. The left component 酉 serves as a sound hint, roughly indicating how the character is pronounced. The right component 鬼 means ghost or demon, creatures associated with ugliness and wrongdoing in East Asian tradition. By pairing a demon-like entity with the sound component 酉, the character came to mean ugly, shameful, or morally unclean — the visual combination reinforcing the idea of something twisted or wrong.
Components
- 酉
- 鬼
A sound hint component points at the character’s pronunciation, not its meaning — don’t read a meaning into it.
Common words
Reference
- Strokes
- 17
- Kangxi radical
- 164
- Formation type
- Phono-semantic (meaning + sound hint)
- Grade
- Jōyō (secondary school)
- Frequency rank
- #2074 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 1
- Unicode
- U+0919C