Meaning & readings
genesis, wound, injury, hurt, start, originate
Origin
This character combines two parts to convey ideas of making and injuring. The right side, a knife radical, suggests cutting or wounding. The left side is a sound hint that tells you how to pronounce the character roughly like the word for "storehouse," but its actual job is just phonetic—it doesn't contribute to the meaning. Together, the knife combined with this phonetic element came to mean both the physical act of cutting or creating a wound, and by extension, the act of creating or beginning something new, since both involve making a change or mark on something.
AI-generated (claude-haiku-4-5), not yet reviewed. Formation type (automated guess): Phono-semantic (meaning + sound hint).
Components
- 倉
- 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
- 12
- Kangxi radical
- 18
- Grade
- Grade 6 (Kyōiku)
- Frequency rank
- #741 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 1
- Unicode
- U+05275