Meaning & readings
pay, clear out, prune, banish, dispose of
Origin
The left side shows a hand, which makes sense since paying or clearing things out involves a sweeping or brushing motion with your hand. The right component is a sound hint that helps indicate how to pronounce the character, rather than adding to the meaning. Together, the hand-based action of sweeping or brushing something away—whether money changing hands, weeds being pruned, or something being disposed of—became the central meaning of this character.
AI-generated (claude-haiku-4-5), not yet reviewed. Formation type (automated guess): Phono-semantic (meaning + sound hint).
Components
- 扌
- 厶
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
- 64
- Grade
- Jōyō (secondary school)
- Frequency rank
- #813 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 2
- Unicode
- U+06255