Meaning & readings
descend, precipitate, fall, surrender
Origin
The left side of this character is a radical meaning "walking" or "movement," which points to the idea of going somewhere. The right side is a sound hint that tells you roughly how to pronounce the character in Chinese, not what it means. Together, the combination of "movement" plus this sound hint gave the character its meaning of descending or falling downward — like walking or moving in a downward direction. Over time, this meaning expanded to include rain falling, soldiers surrendering, or anything that comes down from above.
AI-generated (claude-haiku-4-5), not yet reviewed. Formation type (automated guess): Phono-semantic (meaning + sound hint).
Components
- ⻖
- 夅
A sound hint component points at the character’s pronunciation, not its meaning — don’t read a meaning into it.
Common words
Reference
- Strokes
- 10
- Kangxi radical
- 170
- Grade
- Grade 6 (Kyōiku)
- Frequency rank
- #596 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 2
- Unicode
- U+0964D