Meaning & readings
nothingness, none, ain't, nothing, nil, not
Origin
The character 無 combines a sound hint at the top that roughly suggests how to pronounce it with a fire radical (the four dots) at the bottom. The fire component doesn't directly mean fire here—instead it acts as a classifier to group this character with related words. The overall shape came to mean nothingness or absence through an ancient pictorial or symbolic origin that is now obscured by the character's age. Over time, the combination solidified to represent the concept of "nothing" or "not existing," which is how it's used in modern Japanese and Chinese.
AI-generated (claude-haiku-4-5), not yet reviewed. Formation type (automated guess): Phono-semantic (meaning + sound hint).
Components
- 丿+2+一+3+3+3+3+2
- 灬
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
- 86
- Grade
- Grade 4 (Kyōiku)
- Frequency rank
- #274 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 2
- Unicode
- U+07121