Meaning & readings
leaf, plane, lobe, needle, blade, spear, counter for flat things, fragment, piece
Origin
The character 葉 combines a grass or plant radical at the top, which signals that this character refers to something botanical, with the component 枼 below it. That bottom component serves as a sound hint, telling you roughly how to pronounce the character without contributing to its meaning. Since leaves are the most obvious plant part visible to everyday people, the combination of "plant" plus the sound element naturally came to mean "leaf." Over time, the meaning expanded to include other thin, flat parts like plane surfaces, lobes, or blades, which all share the leaf's characteristic shape.
AI-generated (claude-haiku-4-5), not yet reviewed. Formation type (automated guess): Phono-semantic (meaning + sound hint).
Components
- 艹
- 枼
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
- 140
- Grade
- Grade 3 (Kyōiku)
- Frequency rank
- #414 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 2
- Unicode
- U+08449