Meaning & readings
attend, doing, official, serve
Origin
The left side shows a person (the radical meaning "human"), and the right side is a sound hint that tells you roughly how to pronounce the character. The combination of "person" with this sound component creates a character meaning to serve or attend to someone — the idea being that a person who fulfills this role is an official or servant. Over time, the meaning broadened to include any kind of work or task that a person does in service to others.
AI-generated (claude-haiku-4-5), not yet reviewed. Formation type (automated guess): Phono-semantic (meaning + sound hint).
Components
- 亻
- 士
A sound hint component points at the character’s pronunciation, not its meaning — don’t read a meaning into it.
Common words
Reference
- Strokes
- 5
- Kangxi radical
- 9
- Grade
- Grade 3 (Kyōiku)
- Frequency rank
- #439 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 3
- Unicode
- U+04ED5