Meaning & readings
partial, side, left-side radical, inclining, biased
Origin
The left component is a person radical, which classifies this character as relating to human behavior or condition. The right component acts as a sound hint, suggesting the character's Chinese pronunciation. The combination creates a character meaning "to lean" or "to be biased"—picturing a person who is tilted or shifted to one side rather than standing balanced and centered. This visual idea of imbalance or lopsidedness captures the sense of partiality or bias that the character carries today.
AI-generated (claude-haiku-4-5), not yet reviewed. Formation type (automated guess): Phono-semantic (meaning + sound hint).
Components
- 亻
- 扁
A sound hint component points at the character’s pronunciation, not its meaning — don’t read a meaning into it.
Common words
- 偏り かたより deviation; inclination
- 偏狭 へんきょう narrow-mindedness; intolerance
- 偏見 へんけん prejudice; bias
- 偏向 へんこう propensity; tendency
- 偏重 へんちょう attaching too much importance to; placing disproportionate emphasis on
- 偏食 へんしょく unbalanced diet
- 偏る かたよる to lean (to one side); to incline
- 偏差値 へんさち deviation value (usu. scaled to mean of 50, standard deviation of 10, and often used for academic grades); deviation
Reference
- Strokes
- 11
- Kangxi radical
- 9
- Grade
- Jōyō (secondary school)
- Frequency rank
- #1340 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 1
- Unicode
- U+0504F