Meaning & readings
undertake, scheme, design, attempt, plan
Origin
This character shows a person (人) standing on tiptoes or straining upward, with the foot or stopping radical (止) at the base. The image of someone stretching up on their toes suggests the effort and reaching that come with attempting something ambitious or planning ahead. Over time, this visual metaphor of straining upward came to mean "undertake" or "scheme"—the idea of exerting yourself toward a goal. The combination captures the sense of physical effort needed to achieve something, which naturally extended to mean any kind of deliberate plan or attempt.
AI-generated (claude-haiku-4-5), not yet reviewed. Formation type (automated guess): Compound ideographic (combined meanings).
Common words
Reference
- Strokes
- 6
- Kangxi radical
- 9
- Grade
- Jōyō (secondary school)
- Frequency rank
- #278 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 1
- Unicode
- U+04F01