Meaning & readings
storehouse, hide, own, have, possess
Origin
This character combines a plant radical at the top with a sound component at the bottom that hints at pronunciation. The plant element suggests something related to vegetation or storage of plant materials like grain. The bottom component provides a phonetic clue for how to pronounce the character. Over time, the meaning expanded from literal storage of crops to any kind of storehouse or storage place, and then further to the idea of possessing or hiding things—all senses of keeping things safely contained or concealed.
AI-generated (claude-haiku-4-5), not yet reviewed. Formation type (automated guess): Phono-semantic (meaning + sound hint).
Components
- 艹
- 臧T
A sound hint component points at the character’s pronunciation, not its meaning — don’t read a meaning into it.
Common words
- 蔵書 ぞうしょ collection of books; (personal) library
- 蔵相 ぞうしょう Minister of Finance
- 大蔵 おおくら Ministry of Finance
- 地蔵 じぞう Kshitigarbha (bodhisattva who looks over children, travellers and the underworld); Ksitigarbha
- 貯蔵 ちょぞう storage; preservation
- 内蔵 ないぞう internal (e.g. mechanism, feature); built-in
- 埋蔵 まいぞう burying in the ground
- 冷蔵 れいぞう cold storage; refrigeration
Reference
- Strokes
- 15
- Kangxi radical
- 140
- Grade
- Grade 6 (Kyōiku)
- Frequency rank
- #468 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 2
- Unicode
- U+08535