Meaning & readings
plane, sharpen, whittle, pare, shave
Origin
The character 削 combines two parts to show the idea of scraping or shaving. On the right is a knife or blade radical, which signals that this character involves cutting or slicing. On the left is a sound component that hints at the pronunciation without contributing to the meaning. Together, these parts created a character representing the action of using a blade to pare down or sharpen something by removing thin layers.
AI-generated (claude-haiku-4-5), not yet reviewed. Formation type (automated guess): Phono-semantic (meaning + sound hint).
Components
- 肖
- 刂
A sound hint component points at the character’s pronunciation, not its meaning — don’t read a meaning into it.
Common words
Reference
- Strokes
- 9
- Kangxi radical
- 18
- Grade
- Jōyō (secondary school)
- Frequency rank
- #814 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 1
- Unicode
- U+0524A