Meaning & readings
interchange, period, change, convert, replace, renew
Origin
This character combines a hand radical on the left with a sound component on the right. The hand radical suggests an action done with the hands — specifically the physical act of swapping or exchanging one thing for another. The right component provides a sound hint for how the character should be pronounced, roughly "kan." Together, the hand element captures the idea of manual exchange or replacement, while the sound component anchors the pronunciation. Over time, the meaning broadened from the concrete act of hand-exchanging objects to the more abstract sense of changing, converting, or renewing anything.
AI-generated (claude-haiku-4-5), not yet reviewed. Formation type (automated guess): Phono-semantic (meaning + sound hint).
Components
- 扌
- 奐
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
- 64
- Grade
- Jōyō (secondary school)
- Frequency rank
- #687 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 2
- Unicode
- U+063DB