Meaning & readings
burdensome, pack horse, horse load, send by horse, trivial, worthless
On’yomi ダ、タ
Origin
The character 駄 combines the horse radical 馬 on the left, which establishes that this character relates to horses, with 太 on the right, which serves as a sound hint for pronunciation. Historically, pack horses were used to carry goods and cargo, and the character came to mean a horse load or something transported by horse. Over time, the meaning extended to describe things as burdensome or trivial, perhaps because carrying loads on pack horses was seen as a mundane task. The 太 component doesn't contribute to the meaning but simply signals how the character should be pronounced.
Common words
Easily confused with
These look alike but are unrelated in meaning — check the stroke that differs.
Reference
- Strokes
- 14
- Kangxi radical
- 187
- Formation type
- Phono-semantic (meaning + sound hint)
- Grade
- Jōyō (secondary school)
- Frequency rank
- #1500 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 1
- Unicode
- U+099C4