Meaning & readings
grip, hold, mould sushi, bribe
Origin
The character 握 combines a hand radical on the left, which signals that this word involves gripping or handling something with your hands, with the component 屋 on the right, which serves as a sound hint suggesting how the character should be pronounced. Together, these parts create a character that means to grip or hold something firmly in your grasp, which is the most literal sense of the word. The meaning naturally extended to related actions like molding sushi by hand or metaphorically grasping something like a bribe.
AI-generated (claude-haiku-4-5), not yet reviewed. Formation type (automated guess): Phono-semantic (meaning + sound hint).
Components
- 扌
- 屋
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
- #1003 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 1
- Unicode
- U+063E1