Meaning & readings
vegetable, side dish, greens
Origin
The character 菜 combines a grass radical at the top, which marks it as a plant, with the component 采 below, which serves as a sound hint for pronunciation rather than adding meaning. The grass radical 艹 is a common classifier that groups plant-related characters together, so placing it above any component signals "this is about vegetation." By pairing this plant indicator with 采, which has a similar sound to the character's pronunciation, the character came to mean vegetables or edible greens—the things you'd gather from plants to eat as a side dish.
AI-generated (claude-haiku-4-5), not yet reviewed. Formation type (automated guess): Phono-semantic (meaning + sound hint).
Components
- 艹
- 采
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
- 140
- Grade
- Grade 4 (Kyōiku)
- Frequency rank
- #1327 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 3
- Unicode
- U+083DC