Meaning & readings
thunder, lightning bolt
On’yomi ライ
Kun’yomi かみなり、いかずち、いかづち
Origin
The character 雷 combines rain (雨) stacked on top of a field (田). The rain part makes the meaning clear — this character is about weather phenomena falling from the sky. The field component at the bottom mainly acts as a sound hint, suggesting how the character should be pronounced rather than adding to the meaning. Together, the picture of rain plus this phonetic guide gives us the word for thunder and lightning.
Common words
Easily confused with
These look alike but are unrelated in meaning — check the stroke that differs.
Reference
- Strokes
- 13
- Kangxi radical
- 173
- Formation type
- Phono-semantic (meaning + sound hint)
- Grade
- Jōyō (secondary school)
- Frequency rank
- #1491 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 1
- Unicode
- U+096F7