Meaning & readings
detach, separation, disjoin, digress
Origin
This character combines a sound hint on the left with a bird radical on the right. The left component "离" tells you roughly how to pronounce the character, while the right component "隹" — a picture of a bird — suggests the original meaning. Birds naturally separate and fly apart from one another, so a character showing a bird came to express the idea of things pulling away or becoming detached. Over time the meaning broadened beyond birds to any kind of separation or disjunction.
AI-generated (claude-haiku-4-5), not yet reviewed. Formation type (automated guess): Phono-semantic (meaning + sound hint).
Components
- 离
- 隹
A sound hint component points at the character’s pronunciation, not its meaning — don’t read a meaning into it.
Common words
Reference
- Strokes
- 19
- Kangxi radical
- 172
- Grade
- Jōyō (secondary school)
- Frequency rank
- #555 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 1
- Unicode
- U+096E2