字 Kanji Decipher

Meaning & readings

echo, sound, resound, ring, vibrate

On’yomi キョウ
Kun’yomi ひび.く

Origin

The character combines "sound" (音, the actual meaning component at the bottom) with a sound hint at the top. The top part, 郷, suggests how the character should be pronounced—it's meant to sound something like "kyou." By pairing a component that clearly means sound with a pronunciation guide, the kanji builds up the idea of sound and how it resonates, echoes, or rings through space. The left side of the character even contains the radical for sound, making it visually clear that this kanji is fundamentally about acoustic phenomena.

AI-generated (claude-haiku-4-5), not yet reviewed. Formation type (automated guess): Phono-semantic (meaning + sound hint).

響 20 strokes

Components

  • 郷 sound hint top
  • 音 radical bottom

A sound hint component points at the character’s pronunciation, not its meaning — don’t read a meaning into it.

Common words

  • 影響 えいきょう influence; effect
  • 音響 おんきょう sound; noise
  • 響く ひびく to resound; to be heard far away
  • 反響 はんきょう echo; reverberation
  • 響き ひびき echo; reverberation
  • 悪影響 あくえいきょう bad influence; negative influence
  • 影響力 えいきょうりょく influence; clout
  • 交響曲 こうきょうきょく symphony

Related kanji

Same radical

Reference

Strokes
20
Kangxi radical
180
Grade
Jōyō (secondary school)
Frequency rank
#502 (newspapers)
Former JLPT
level 1
Unicode
U+097FF