Meaning & readings
hungry, starve
On’yomi キ
Kun’yomi う.える
Origin
This character combines a food radical on the left, which signals the general topic of eating and nutrition, with a sound component on the right that hints at the pronunciation. The food radical appears in characters related to hunger and appetite, while the sound component gives you a clue to how the character is pronounced. Together they create a character that specifically means hunger or starvation — the absence or lack of food that the radical represents.
Components
- 飠
- 几
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
- 184
- Formation type
- Phono-semantic (meaning + sound hint)
- Grade
- Jōyō (secondary school)
- Frequency rank
- #1659 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 1
- Unicode
- U+098E2