Meaning & readings
conjecture, infer, guess, suppose, support, push (for)
Origin
The character 推 combines a hand radical on the left, which indicates an action you do with your hands, with a sound component on the right that suggests the pronunciation. The hand part points toward the physical meaning of pushing or shoving something. Over time, the character developed the related sense of "support" — like pushing someone's cause forward — and then extended to mental acts like inferring or guessing, where you're figuratively "pushing" your reasoning forward to reach a conclusion. The sound component doesn't contribute to the meaning, only hints at how the word is pronounced.
AI-generated (claude-haiku-4-5), not yet reviewed. Formation type (automated guess): Phono-semantic (meaning + sound hint).
Components
- 扌
- 隹
A sound hint component points at the character’s pronunciation, not its meaning — don’t read a meaning into it.
Common words
Reference
- Strokes
- 11
- Kangxi radical
- 64
- Grade
- Grade 6 (Kyōiku)
- Frequency rank
- #507 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 1
- Unicode
- U+063A8