Meaning & readings
ancestor, pioneer, founder
Origin
This character combines a shrine or altar symbol on the left, which marks it as relating to religious or ancestral matters, with a sound hint on the right that suggests roughly how to pronounce it. The shrine component makes sense because ancestors were venerated at family altars and shrines in East Asian cultures. Over time, the character came to mean not just the ancestors themselves but also pioneers or founders—people who are revered as the origins of something, much like ancestors are the origins of a family line.
AI-generated (claude-haiku-4-5), not yet reviewed. Formation type (automated guess): Phono-semantic (meaning + sound hint).
Components
- 礻
- 且
A sound hint component points at the character’s pronunciation, not its meaning — don’t read a meaning into it.
Common words
Reference
- Strokes
- 9
- Kangxi radical
- 113
- Grade
- Grade 5 (Kyōiku)
- Frequency rank
- #1226 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 2
- Unicode
- U+07956